Search Results

Search found 2343 results on 94 pages for 'jason b standing'.

Page 94/94 | < Previous Page | 90 91 92 93 94 

• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, July 06, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, July 06, 2012Popular ReleasesTaskScheduler ASP.NET: Release 3 - 1.2.0.0: Release 3 - Version 1.2.0.0 That version was altered only the library: In TaskScheduler was added new properties: UseBackgroundThreads Enables the use of separate threads for each task. StoreThreadsInPool Manager enables to store in the Pool threads that are performing the tasks. OnStopSchedulerAutoCancelThreads Scheduler allows aborting threads when it is stopped. false if the scheduler is not aborted the threads that are running. AutoDeletedExecutedTasks Allows Manager Delete Task afte...xUnit.net Contrib: xunitcontrib-resharper 0.6 (RS 7.0, 6.1.1): xunitcontrib release 0.6 (ReSharper runner) This release provides a test runner plugin for Resharper 7.0 (EAP build 82) and 6.1, targetting all versions of xUnit.net. (See the xUnit.net project to download xUnit.net itself.) Copies of the plugin that support previous verions of ReSharper can be downloaded from this release. The plan is to support the latest revisions of the last two paid-for major versions of ReSharper (namely 7.0 and 6.1) Also note that all builds work against ALL VERSIONS...Umbraco CMS: Umbraco 4.8.0 Beta: Whats newuComponents in the core Multi-Node Tree Picker, Multiple Textstring, Slider and XPath Lists Easier Lucene searching built in IFile providers for easier file handling Updated 3rd party libraries Applications / Trees moved out of the database SQL Azure support added Various bug fixes Getting Started A great place to start is with our Getting Started Guide: Getting Started Guide: http://umbraco.codeplex.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?DownloadId=197051 Make sure to...CODE Framework: 4.0.20704.0: See CODE Framework (.NET) Change Log for changes in this version.?????????? - ????????: All-In-One Code Framework ??? 2012-07-04: http://download.codeplex.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?ProjectName=1codechs&DownloadId=216140 ???OneCode??????，??????????10????Microsoft OneCode Sample，????4?Windows Base Sample，2?XML Sample?4?ASP.NET Sample。???????????。 ????，?????。http://i3.codeplex.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?ProjectName=1code&DownloadId=128165 Windows Base Sample CSCheckOSBitness VBCheckOSBitness CSCheckOSVersion VBCheckOSVersion XML Sample CSXPath VBXPath ASP.NET Sample CSASPNETDataPager VBASPNET...sheetengine - Isometric HTML5 JavaScript Display Engine: sheetengine v1.0: The first release of sheetengine. See sheetengine.codeplex.com for a list of features and examples.AssaultCube Reloaded: 2.5.1 Intrepid Fixed: Linux has Ubuntu 11.10 32-bit precompiled binaries and Ubuntu 10.10 64-bit precompiled binaries, but you can compile your own as it also contains the source. If you are using Mac or other operating systems, download the Linux package. Try to compile it. If it fails, download a virtual machine. The server pack is ready for both Windows and Linux, but you might need to compile your own for Linux (source included) If you use the default maprot or any maprot, you need to fix it Well, 2.5 was...xUnit.net - Unit testing framework for C# and .NET (a successor to NUnit): xUnit.net 1.9.1: xUnit.net release 1.9.1Build #1600 Important note for Resharper users: Resharper support has been moved to the xUnit.net Contrib project. Important note for TestDriven.net users: If you are having issues running xUnit.net tests in TestDriven.net, especially on 64-bit Windows, we strongly recommend you upgrade to TD.NET version 3.0 or later. Important note for VS2012 users: The VS2012 runner is in the Visual Studio Gallery now, and should be installed via Tools | Extension Manager from insi...MVC Controls Toolkit: Mvc Controls Toolkit 2.2.0: Added Modified all Mv4 related features to conform with the Mvc4 RC Now all items controls accept any IEnumerable<T>(before just List<T> were accepted by most of controls) retrievalManager class that retrieves automatically data from a data source whenever it catchs events triggered by filtering, sorting, and paging controls move method to the updatesManager to move one child objects from a father to another. The move operation can be undone like the insert, update and delete operatio...D3API.Net: TESTING TOOLS (PRE-BLIZZARD API RELEASE): PLEASE NOTE: This release is COMPLETELY SEPARATE from the API. It is intended only so development with this API can begin. This will not be a maintained part of the project. (The Test Application might evolve, but the Test API will not) This release is to address the issue that since Blizzard hasn't released the API, you cannot test this API. Because of this, I decided to create a Test Application AND a Test API that includes the following: Test Application: --Has built in examples from Bl...RTF DOM Parser: 2012-7-3 Relasese: Fix some bug when parse RTFBlackJumboDog: Ver5.6.6: 2012.07.03 Ver5.6.6 (1) ???????????ftp://?????????、????LIST?????Mini SQL Query: Mini SQL Query (v1.0.68.441): Just a bug fix release for when the connections try to refresh after an edit. Make sure you read the Quickstart for an introduction.Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.58: Fix for Issue #18296: provide "ALL" value to the -ignore switch to ignore all error and warning messages. Fix for issue #18293: if encountering EOF before a function declaration or expression is properly closed, throw an appropriate error and don't crash. Adjust the variable-renaming algorithm so it's very specific when renaming variables with the same number of references so a single source file ends up with the same minified names on different platforms. add the ability to specify kno...LogExpert: 1.4 build 4566: This release for the 1.4 version line contains various fixes which have been made some times ago. Until now these fixes were only available in the 1.5 alpha versions. It also contains a fix for: 710. Column finder (press F8 to show) Terminal server issues: Multiple sessions with same user should work now Settings Export/Import available via Settings Dialog still incomple (e.g. tab colors are not saved) maybe I change the file format one day no command line support yet (for importin...CommonLibrary.NET: CommonLibrary.NET 0.9.8.5 - Final Release: A collection of very reusable code and components in C# 4.0 ranging from ActiveRecord, Csv, Command Line Parsing, Configuration, Holiday Calendars, Logging, Authentication, and much more. FluentscriptCommonLibrary.NET 0.9.8 contains a scripting language called FluentScript. Releases notes for FluentScript located at http://fluentscript.codeplex.com/wikipage?action=Edit&title=Release%20Notes&referringTitle=Documentation Fluentscript - 0.9.8.5 - Final ReleaseApplication: FluentScript Versio...SharePoint 2010 Metro UI: SharePoint 2010 Metro UI8: Please review the documentation link for how to install. Installation takes some basic knowledge of how to upload and edit SharePoint Artifact files. Please view the discussions tab for ongoing FAQsnopCommerce. Open source shopping cart (ASP.NET MVC): nopcommerce 2.60: Highlight features & improvements: • Significant performance optimization. • Use AJAX for adding products to the cart. • New flyout mini-shopping cart. • Auto complete suggestions for product searching. • Full-Text support. • EU cookie law support. To see the full list of fixes and changes please visit the release notes page (http://www.nopCommerce.com/releasenotes.aspx).THE NVL Maker: The NVL Maker Ver 3.51: http://download.codeplex.com/Download?ProjectName=nvlmaker&DownloadId=371510 ????：http://115.com/file/beoef05k#THE-NVL-Maker-ver3.51-sim.7z ????：http://www.mediafire.com/file/6tqdwj9jr6eb9qj/THENVLMakerver3.51tra.7z ======================================== ???? ======================================== 3.51 beta ???： ·?????????????????????? ·?????????，?????????0，?????????????????????? ·??????????????????????????? ·?????????????TJS????（EXP??） ·??4:3???，???????????????，??????????? ·?????????...????: ????2.0.3: 1、???????????。 2、????????。 3、????????????。 4、bug??，????。New Projects40FINGERS DotNetNuke Demo Skins: Collection of DotNetNuke Demo Skins, create for you by Timo Breumelhof of 40FINGERS. Check out the individual downloads for more informationASP.NET Virtual Templates: This project allows you to provide files like views, stylsheets and scripts embedded in an assembly to any web application by using the virtual file system.Bauble: Bauble is a dock launcher written in C# utilizing WPF. As a launcher, it contains an animated list application icons, and will open their program on click.BBQ Assistant: Project to create and maintain a Windows Phone application to allow users to enter BBQ events and record timelines.CharmFlyout - A Metro Flyout Custom Control: A custom control for displaying flyouts from the settings charm in Windows Metro style (WinRT) applications written in C# / XAML.dotNetDR_Auth2????API????: This is SUMMARYEntacts: Entacts app is a contact app for electronic contacts.FlMML customized: FlMML customized ?、FlMML?MML?????????????????????。 FlMML?Flash?????????????????。 MML????????????????????????????。 FluidDb: FluidDb is a better microORM. Unique features, excellent performance, and cleaner code in as few trips to the database as possible.Gabe's gubb Framework (GGF): GGF is a set of classes built to help you work with the REST-based gubb API(http://gubb.net). gubb is a list management site similar to (better than?) Remember the Milk. The core of GGF allows for object/transaction modeling and facilitation of HTTP-based requests. Written in C#.Grandshot 2: Grandshot 2 is an awesome 2D shooter with a great ragdoll and animation system, vehicles and lots of blood and gore. Written in VB.NetJason's CG: This is jason's CGJQS: This is a simple WriterService.Lincoln Wood: An evolutionary implementation of the next gen Lincoln Wood Community environment using MVC2 and other good stuff.Microsoft CRM PluginQuickDeploy: Small tool for deploy your CRM 2011 plugin very fast, especially in the development process. It can also be added into the build event in Visual Studio 2010.Morus: socialMouseBot: Prevent a PC from sleeping the silly way: move the mouse cursor on a timer!QIF AS9102 Form Design Study: This is a Visual Studio 2010 C# Winform application that uses a simple AS9102 form as a design study for consuming (C3) and producing (C2) QIF sample xml files.RaveIt: Windows phone 7 drumm machine appRESTFunctoids: RESTFunctoids for BizTalk 2010 allows you to consume REST Services directly from your map.Secure(): Secure() MS Repo This repository will host Microsoft-oriented code from my site Secure() at http://nathanv.comSharpMik: SharpMik is a library to play Amiga music using C#SharpSyslog: Syslog server lib for .Net/C# (v3.5) implementing RFC 5424 The Syslog Protocol. SuperMetroQuiz: O SuperQuiz é um jogo de Quiz para Windows 8, desenvolvido em C#, que utilizou como base o template grid, disponível no Visual Studio 2012 RC. takela: An ASP.Net MVC Razor Project. TaskScheduler ASP.NET: Simple Example of how to schedule tasks in ASP.NET. works in WebForms, MVC and others, dont need requests or infinite loops. provides full control over the taskTeenyGrab: Take screenshots and upload them to FTP server at the touch of a button.testdd07052012git01: cxvtestdd07052012git1: xzctestdd07052012hg01: cvtestddhg0705201201: xzctesttfs07052012tfs01: zxtesttom07052012git02: rfeThTa7Maged: Its Point of sale project TX264: A GUI for x264, ffmpeg, lame, faac, qaac, neroaacenc, oggenc, aften, lame, flac, mp4box and mkvtoolnix.Visual Studio Extension - Collapse Solution: Visual Studio extension that collapses every item in the Solution Explorer tool window at the solution or project level.Visual Studio Extension - Enable Code Analysis: Visual Studio extension that turns Code Analysis On or Off for all projects in the solution.VocalsBase: not foundWPF Active Directory Explorer: Robust and Extensible Active Directory Explorer and Editoryeg: . Net deneme

  Read the article

• CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, December 05, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, December 05, 2012Popular ReleasesYahoo! UI Library: YUI Compressor for .Net: Version 2.2.0.0 - Epee: New : Web Optimization package! Cleaned up the nuget packages BugFix: minifying lots of files will now be faster because of a recent regression in some code. (We were instantiating something far too many times).DtPad - .NET Framework text editor: DtPad 2.9.0.40: http://dtpad.diariotraduttore.com/files/images/flag-eng.png English + A new built-in editor for the management of CSV files, including the edit of cells, deleting and adding new rows, replacement of delimiter character and much more (issue #1137) + The limit of rows allowed before the decommissioning of their side panel has been raised (new default: 1.000) (issue #1155, only partially solved) + Pressing CTRL+TAB now DtPad opens a screen that shows the list of opened tabs (issue #1143) + Note...Apex: Apex 1.5: Currently in development, Apex 1.5 is primarily a tidy-up, bug fix and minor feature release. New Features The 'AsynchronousCommand' now has the property 'DisableDuringExecution'. If set to true, this will disable execution of the command while it is already executing. The default is false. The 'Command' class now has a strongly typed analogue, Command<TParameter> that allows strong typing of its underlying function. Added the CueTextBox. The CueTextBox is a textbox that can optionally d...AvalonDock: AvalonDock 2.0.1746: Welcome to the new release of AvalonDock 2.0 This release contains a lot (lot) of bug fixes and some great improvements: Views Caching: Content of Documents and Anchorables is no more recreated everytime user move it. Autohide pane opens really fast now. Two new themes Expression (Dark and Light) and Metro (both of them still in experimental stage). If you already use AD 2.0 or plan to integrate it in your future projects, I'm interested in your ideas for new features: http://avalondock...AcDown?????: AcDown????? v4.3.2: ??●AcDown??????????、??、??、???????。????，????，?????????????????????????。???????????Acfun、????(Bilibili)、??、??、YouTube、??、???、??????、SF????、????????????。 ●??????AcPlay?????，??????、????????????????。 ● AcDown??????????????????，????????????????????????????。 ● AcDown???????C#??，????.NET Framework 2.0??。?????"Acfun?????"。 ?? v4.3.2?? ?????????????????? ??Acfun??????? ??Bilibili?????? ??Bilibili???????????? ??Bilibili????????? ??????????????? ???? ??Bilibili??????? ????32??64? Windows XP/...ExtJS based ASP.NET 2.0 Controls: FineUI v3.2.2: ??FineUI ?? ExtJS ??? ASP.NET 2.0 ???。 FineUI??? ?? No JavaScript，No CSS，No UpdatePanel，No ViewState，No WebServices ???????。 ?????? IE 7.0、Firefox 3.6、Chrome 3.0、Opera 10.5、Safari 3.0+ ???? Apache License 2.0 (Apache) ???? ??：http://fineui.com/bbs/ ??：http://fineui.com/demo/ ??：http://fineui.com/doc/ ??：http://fineui.codeplex.com/ ???? +2012-12-03 v3.2.2 -?????????????，?????button/button_menu.aspx（????）。 +?Window????Plain??；?ToolbarPosition??Footer??；?????FooterBarAlign??。 -????win...Player Framework by Microsoft: Player Framework for Windows Phone 8: This is a brand new version of the Player Framework for Windows Phone, available exclusively for Windows Phone 8, and now based upon the Player Framework for Windows 8. While this new version is not backward compatible with Windows Phone 7 (get that http://smf.codeplex.com/releases/view/88970), it does offer the same great feature set plus dozens of new features such as advertising, localization support, and improved skinning. Click here for more information about what's new in the Windows P...ASP.NET Youtube Clone: ASP.NET Youtube Clone ver 7.1: ASP.NET Youtube Clone Free Script version 7.1SSH.NET Library: 2012.12.3: New feature(s): + SynchronizeDirectoriesmenu4web: menu4web 1.1 - free javascript menu: menu4web 1.1 has been tested with all major browsers: Firefox, Chrome, IE, Opera and Safari. Minified m4w.js library is less than 9K. Includes 22 menu examples of different styles. Can be freely distributed under The MIT License (MIT).Quest: Quest 5.3 Beta: New features in Quest 5.3 include: Grid-based map (sponsored by Phillip Zolla) Changable POV (sponsored by Phillip Zolla) Game log (sponsored by Phillip Zolla) Customisable object link colour (sponsored by Phillip Zolla) More room description options (by James Gregory) More mathematical functions now available to expressions Desktop Player uses the same UI as WebPlayer - this will make it much easier to implement customisation options New sorting functions: ObjectListSort(list,...Chinook Database: Chinook Database 1.4: Chinook Database 1.4 This is a sample database available in multiple formats: SQL scripts for multiple database vendors, embeded database files, and XML format. The Chinook data model is available here. ChinookDatabase1.4_CompleteVersion.zip is a complete package for all supported databases/data sources. There are also packages for each specific data source. Supported Database ServersDB2 EffiProz MySQL Oracle PostgreSQL SQL Server SQL Server Compact SQLite Issues Resolved293...RiP-Ripper & PG-Ripper: RiP-Ripper 2.9.34: changes FIXED: Thanks Function when "Download each post in it's own folder" is disabled FIXED: "PixHub.eu" linksD3 Loot Tracker: 1.5.6: Updated to work with D3 version 1.0.6.13300????????API for .Net SDK: SDK for .Net ??? Release 5: 2012?11?30??? ?OAuth?????????????????????SDK OAuth oauth = new OAuth("<AppKey>", "<AppSecret>", "<????>"); WebProxy proxy = new WebProxy(); proxy.Address = new Uri("http://proxy.domain.com:3128");//??????????? proxy.Credentials = new NetworkCredential("<??>", "<??>");//???????，??? oauth.Proxy = proxy; //??????，?~ Magelia WebStore Open-source Ecommerce software: Magelia WebStore 2.2: new UI for the Administration console Bugs fixes and improvement version 2.2.215.3nopCommerce. Open source shopping cart (ASP.NET MVC): nopcommerce 2.70: Highlight features & improvements: • Performance optimization. • Search engine optimization. ID-less URLs for products, categories, and manufacturers. • Added ACL support (access control list) on products and categories. • Minify and bundle JavaScript files. • Allow a store owner to decide which billing/shipping address fields are enabled/disabled/required (like it's already done for the registration page). • Moved to MVC 4 (.NET 4.5 is required). • Now Visual Studio 2012 is required to work ...NHook - A debugger API: NHook 1.0: x86 debugger Resolve symbol from MS Public server Resolve RVA from executable's image Add breakpoints Assemble / Disassemble target process assembly More information here, you can also check unit tests that are real sample code.PDF Library: PDFLib v2.0: Release notes This new version include many bug fixes and include support for stream objects and cross-reference object streams. New FeatureExtract images from the PDFDocument.Editor: 2013.5: Whats new for Document.Editor 2013.5: New Read-only File support New Check For Updates support Minor Bug Fix's, improvements and speed upsNew ProjectsBookList: Schoolproject for createing a catalogue about schoolbooks. This loads books from a .txt file which is given by the publisher.BunnyHug: BunnyHug Client is an small footprint, high performance and userfriendly piece of software that synchronizes local folder to your Google Docs for Google Apps Premium usersCarRental001: carConCatJS: ConCatJS is a simple application that is capable of recursively processing directories and concatenating the JavaScript (or CSS) files therein into a single file.DemonBuddy Ultimate Plugin: Demon Buddy Plugin which handle all aspect of program: - Looting - Combat - Vendor run - Xml Profile TagDIYbook: 1234567Dynamics Crm 2011 Solution Manager: Dynamics Crm 2011 Solution Manager is used to automatically export/import the Crm 2011 solutions with some pre-defined settings.Easy Weather: PBKHosts Switcher: This small tray icon utility takes care about your host files, so developer can easily switch between QA, production and local environment.ImageGallery CRM 2011: Image loader for annotations CRM 2011 KinectSDK-Kinventor: Library wchich will work as bridge between Kinect and Inventor APILava JS: Lava is a javascript framework that makes creating web applications much easier. It allows you clearly separate logic from the UI by utilizing MVC concepts.LevelEditor: Level Editor is a tool for creating and editing game levels, written entirely in C#/WPF 4.Luxoft test tasks: Luxoft test tasks for competitorsMap Generator: Map Generator for your Civ/Col/Roguelike games in VB.NET.MAXP: ??Membership Adapter: Another approach: adapting MebershipProvider abstract class instead of inheriting it. Motion Maker for Pmd: Test Project.mp3player-xslt-plugin: This is an Umbraco based module for managing mp3 media. You can upload the mp3 media in the dashboard and then display those media anywhere in your site.Music Store Lab: Music Store Lab migrates the original to MVC4, using code first migrations.Mvc Dependency: Mvc Dependency is the smaller better looking sibling of Client Dependency. There's no standing on your head to support legacy Web Forms, just plain simple conventions that put you in control of your resources.MyOrchard: thanks ！i myXbyqwrhjadsfasfhgf: myXbyqwrhjadsfasfhgfnApp: Racunovodstveni software za hrvatsko tržišteNazTek.Extension.Clr4: CLR 4.0 extensions and utility APINinja Echo: Ninja Echo is a bot for Stack Overflow chat. It plugs in as a Greasemonkey userscript, and listens for and sends messages.p_zpp_grc: forum dyskusyjne ASP.NET - projekt ATHPivotal Tracker API wrapper: .NET 4.0 C# wrapper for PivotalTracker API. PrinceOfPersia.net: PrinceOfPersia is a game porting of the famous 80' classic game "Prince Of Persia" maded by Broderbound and J. Mechner game. Project13271205: dfProntuário Eletrônico do Paciente: O desenvolvimento de um Prontuário Eletrônico em Saúde (PEP) depende de componentes de software. Alguns públicos são compilados aqui.quirli - free media player for replay and rehearsal.: quirli is a free media player for music replay and rehearsal. It's main feature is fast navigation to predefined cue points in the media.Reinventing the Wheel: Interested in reinventing the wheel? Tired of re-implementing every single helpful piece of code again and again? That's why "Wheels" Project is introduced.Roll the Dice by Ma Chung: This project is developed by - Fika Aditya - M. Ainur R System Information - Ma Chung Universitysc2md: starcraft.md news portalShot In The Dark: Shot In The Dark is a multiplayer top-down 2D shooter framework developed in Flash/AS3.0, and uses the Nonoba Multiplayer API.Silverlog: Blog in silverlightSitecore PowerShell Console: PowerShell environment for Sitecore allowing to apply complex modifications, manipulate sites, files and items and perform content analysis & reports.Solid Edge Community: Solid Edge CommunitySpace Shooter: Space shooter just for funtestdyq: testTestMekepasa: prueba de proyectoTicket Information .NET Component: .NET Component, parsing ticket data from websiteWindows 8 Store Maps App Framework: Framework zur Erstellung eines Windows 8 Store App mit dem Bing Maps Control.

  Read the article

• DevConnections Session Slides, Samples and Links

  - by Rick Strahl

  Finally coming up for air this week, after catching up with being on the road for the better part of three weeks. Here are my slides, samples and links for my four DevConnections Session two weeks ago in Vegas. I ended up doing one extra un-prepared for session on WebAPI and AJAX, as some of the speakers were either delayed or unable to make it at all to Vegas due to Sandy's mayhem. It was pretty hectic in the speaker room as Erik (our event coordinator extrodinaire) was scrambling to fill session slots with speakers :-). Surprisingly it didn't feel like the storm affected attendance drastically though, but I guess it's hard to tell without actual numbers. The conference was a lot of fun - it's been a while since I've been speaking at one of these larger conferences. I'd been taking a hiatus, and I forgot how much I enjoy actually giving talks. Preparing - well not  quite so much, especially since I ended up essentially preparing or completely rewriting for all three of these talks and I was stressing out a bit as I was sick the week before the conference and didn't get as much time to prepare as I wanted to. But - as always seems to be the case - it all worked out, but I guess those that attended have to be the judge of that… It was great to catch up with my speaker friends as well - man I feel out of touch. I got to spend a bunch of time with Dan Wahlin, Ward Bell, Julie Lerman and for about 10 minutes even got to catch up with the ever so busy Michele Bustamante. Lots of great technical discussions including a fun and heated REST controversy with Ward and Howard Dierking. There were also a number of great discussions with attendees, describing how they're using the technologies touched in my talks in live applications. I got some great ideas from some of these and I wish there would have been more opportunities for these kinds of discussions. One thing I miss at these Vegas events though is some sort of coherent event where attendees and speakers get to mingle. These Vegas conferences are just like "go to sessions, then go out and PARTY on the town" - it's Vegas after all! But I think that it's always nice to have at least one evening event where everybody gets to hang out together and trade stories and geek talk. Overall there didn't seem to be much opportunity for that beyond lunch or the small and short exhibit hall events which it seemed not many people actually went to. Anyways, a good time was had. I hope those of you that came to my sessions learned something useful. There were lots of great questions and discussions after the sessions - always appreciate hearing the real life scenarios that people deal with in relation to the abstracted scenarios in sessions. Here are the Session abstracts, a few comments and the links for downloading slides and  samples. It's not quite like being there, but I hope this stuff turns out to be useful to some of you. I'll be following up a couple of these sessions with white papers in the following weeks. Enjoy. ASP.NET Architecture: How ASP.NET Works at the Low Level Abstract:Interested in how ASP.NET works at a low level? ASP.NET is extremely powerful and flexible technology, but it's easy to forget about the core framework that underlies the higher level technologies like ASP.NET MVC, WebForms, WebPages, Web Services that we deal with on a day to day basis. The ASP.NET core drives all the higher level handlers and frameworks layered on top of it and with the core power comes some complexity in the form of a very rich object model that controls the flow of a request through the ASP.NET pipeline from Windows HTTP services down to the application level. To take full advantage of it, it helps to understand the underlying architecture and model. This session discusses the architecture of ASP.NET along with a number of useful tidbits that you can use for building and debugging your ASP.NET applications more efficiently. We look at overall architecture, how requests flow from the IIS (7 and later) Web Server to the ASP.NET runtime into HTTP handlers, modules and filters and finally into high-level handlers like MVC, Web Forms or Web API. Focus of this session is on the low-level aspects on the ASP.NET runtime, with examples that demonstrate the bootstrapping of ASP.NET, threading models, how Application Domains are used, startup bootstrapping, how configuration files are applied and how all of this relates to the applications you write either using low-level tools like HTTP handlers and modules or high-level pages or services sitting at the top of the ASP.NET runtime processing chain. Comments:I was surprised to see so many people show up for this session - especially since it was the last session on the last day and a short 1 hour session to boot. The room was packed and it was to see so many people interested the abstracts of architecture of ASP.NET beyond the immediate high level application needs. Lots of great questions in this talk as well - I only wish this session would have been the full hour 15 minutes as we just a little short of getting through the main material (didn't make it to Filters and Error handling). I haven't done this session in a long time and I had to pretty much re-figure all the system internals having to do with the ASP.NET bootstrapping in light for the changes that came with IIS 7 and later. The last time I did this talk was with IIS6, I guess it's been a while. I love doing this session, mainly because in my mind the core of ASP.NET overall is so cleanly designed to provide maximum flexibility without compromising performance that has clearly stood the test of time in the 10 years or so that .NET has been around. While there are a lot of moving parts, the technology is easy to manage once you understand the core components and the core model hasn't changed much even while the underlying architecture that drives has been almost completely revamped especially with the introduction of IIS 7 and later. Download Samples and Slides   Introduction to using jQuery with ASP.NET Abstract:In this session you'll learn how to take advantage of jQuery in your ASP.NET applications. Starting with an overview of jQuery client features via many short and fun examples, you'll find out about core features like the power of selectors for document element selection, manipulating these elements with jQuery's wrapped set methods in a browser independent way, how to hook up and handle events easily and generally apply concepts of unobtrusive JavaScript principles to client scripting. The second half of the session then delves into jQuery's AJAX features and several different ways how you can interact with ASP.NET on the server. You'll see examples of using ASP.NET MVC for serving HTML and JSON AJAX content, as well as using the new ASP.NET Web API to serve JSON and hypermedia content. You'll also see examples of client side templating/databinding with Handlebars and Knockout. Comments:This session was in a monster of a room and to my surprise it was nearly packed, given that this was a 100 level session. I can see that it's a good idea to continue to do intro sessions to jQuery as there appeared to be quite a number of folks who had not worked much with jQuery yet and who most likely could greatly benefit from using it. Seemed seemed to me the session got more than a few people excited to going if they hadn't yet :-).  Anyway I just love doing this session because it's mostly live coding and highly interactive - not many sessions that I can build things up from scratch and iterate on in an hour. jQuery makes that easy though. Resources: Slides and Code Samples Introduction to jQuery White Paper Introduction to ASP.NET Web API   Hosting the Razor Scripting Engine in Your Own Applications Abstract:The Razor Engine used in ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET Web Pages is a free-standing scripting engine that can be disassociated from these Web-specific implementations and can be used in your own applications. Razor allows for a powerful mix of code and text rendering that makes it a wonderful tool for any sort of text generation, from creating HTML output in non-Web applications, to rendering mail merge-like functionality, to code generation for developer tools and even as a plug-in scripting engine. In this session, we'll look at the components that make up the Razor engine and how you can bootstrap it in your own applications to hook up templating. You'll find out how to create custom templates and manage Razor requests that can be pre-compiled, detecting page changes and act in ways similar to a full runtime. We look at ways that you can pass data into the engine and retrieve both the rendered output as well as result values in a package that makes it easy to plug Razor into your own applications. Comments:That this session was picked was a bit of a surprise to me, since it's a bit of a niche topic. Even more of a surprise was that during the session quite a few people who attended had actually used Razor externally and were there to find out more about how the process works and how to extend it. In the session I talk a bit about a custom Razor hosting implementation (Westwind.RazorHosting) and drilled into the various components required to build a custom Razor Hosting engine and a runtime around it. This sessions was a bit of a chore to prepare for as there are lots of technical implementation details that needed to be dealt with and squeezing that into an hour 15 is a bit tight (and that aren't addressed even by some of the wrapper libraries that exist). Found out though that there's quite a bit of interest in using a templating engine outside of web applications, or often side by side with the HTML output generated by frameworks like MVC or WebForms. An extra fun part of this session was that this was my first session and when I went to set up I realized I forgot my mini-DVI to VGA adapter cable to plug into the projector in my room - 6 minutes before the session was about to start. So I ended up sprinting the half a mile + back to my room - and back at a full sprint. I managed to be back only a couple of minutes late, but when I started I was out of breath for the first 10 minutes or so, while trying to talk. Musta sounded a bit funny as I was trying to not gasp too much :-) Resources: Slides and Code Samples Westwind.RazorHosting GitHub Project Original RazorHosting Blog Post   Introduction to ASP.NET Web API for AJAX Applications Abstract:WebAPI provides a new framework for creating REST based APIs, but it can also act as a backend to typical AJAX operations. This session covers the core features of Web API as it relates to typical AJAX application development. We’ll cover content-negotiation, routing and a variety of output generation options as well as managing data updates from the client in the context of a small Single Page Application style Web app. Finally we’ll look at some of the extensibility features in WebAPI to customize and extend Web API in a number and useful useful ways. Comments:This session was a fill in for session slots not filled due MIA speakers stranded by Sandy. I had samples from my previous Web API article so decided to go ahead and put together a session from it. Given that I spent only a couple of hours preparing and putting slides together I was glad it turned out as it did - kind of just ran itself by way of the examples I guess as well as nice audience interactions and questions. Lots of interest - and also some confusion about when Web API makes sense. Both this session and the jQuery session ended up getting a ton of questions about when to use Web API vs. MVC, whether it would make sense to switch to Web API for all AJAX backend work etc. In my opinion there's no need to jump to Web API for existing applications that already have a good AJAX foundation. Web API is awesome for real externally consumed APIs and clearly defined application AJAX APIs. For typical application level AJAX calls, it's still a good idea, but ASP.NET MVC can serve most if not all of that functionality just as well. There's no need to abandon MVC (or even ASP.NET AJAX or third party AJAX backends) just to move to Web API. For new projects Web API probably makes good sense for isolation of AJAX calls, but it really depends on how the application is set up. In some cases sharing business logic between the HTML and AJAX interfaces with a single MVC API can be cleaner than creating two completely separate code paths to serve essentially the same business logic. Resources: Slides and Code Samples Sample Code on GitHub Introduction to ASP.NET Web API White Paper© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in Conferences  ASP.NET   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

  Read the article

• Remove box2d bodies after collision deduction android?

  - by jubin

  Can any one explain me how to destroy box2d body when collide i have tried but my application crashed.First i have checked al collisions then add all the bodies in array who i want to destroy.I am trying to learning this tutorial My all the bodies are falling i want these bodies should destroy when these bodies will collide my actor monkey but when it collide it destroy but my aplication crashed.I have googled and from google i got the application crash reasons we should not destroy body in step funtion but i am removing body in the last of tick method. could any one help me or provide me code aur check my code why i am getting this prblem or how can i destroy box2d bodies. This is my code what i am doing. Please could any one check my code and tell me what is i am doing wrong for removing bodies. The code is for multiple box2d objects falling on my actor monkey it should be destroy when it will fall on the monkey.It is destroing but my application crahes. static class Box2DLayer extends CCLayer { protected static final float PTM_RATIO = 32.0f; protected static final float WALK_FACTOR = 3.0f; protected static final float MAX_WALK_IMPULSE = 0.2f; protected static final float ANIM_SPEED = 0.3f; int isLeft=0; String dir=""; int x =0; float direction; CCColorLayer objectHint; // protected static final float PTM_RATIO = 32.0f; protected World _world; protected static Body spriteBody; CGSize winSize = CCDirector.sharedDirector().winSize(); private static int count = 200; protected static Body monkey_body; private static Body bodies; CCSprite monkey; float animDelay; int animPhase; CCSpriteSheet danceSheet = CCSpriteSheet.spriteSheet("phases.png"); CCSprite _block; List<Body> toDestroy = new ArrayList<Body>(); //CCSpriteSheet _spriteSheet; private static MyContactListener _contactListener = new MyContactListener(); public Box2DLayer() { this.setIsAccelerometerEnabled(true); CCSprite bg = CCSprite.sprite("jungle.png"); addChild(bg,0); bg.setAnchorPoint(0,0); bg.setPosition(0,0); CGSize s = CCDirector.sharedDirector().winSize(); // Use scaled width and height so that our boundaries always match the current screen float scaledWidth = s.width/PTM_RATIO; float scaledHeight = s.height/PTM_RATIO; Vector2 gravity = new Vector2(0.0f, -30.0f); boolean doSleep = false; _world = new World(gravity, doSleep); // Create edges around the entire screen // Define the ground body. BodyDef bxGroundBodyDef = new BodyDef(); bxGroundBodyDef.position.set(0.0f, 0.0f); // The body is also added to the world. Body groundBody = _world.createBody(bxGroundBodyDef); // Register our contact listener // Define the ground box shape. PolygonShape groundBox = new PolygonShape(); Vector2 bottomLeft = new Vector2(0f,0f); Vector2 topLeft = new Vector2(0f,scaledHeight); Vector2 topRight = new Vector2(scaledWidth,scaledHeight); Vector2 bottomRight = new Vector2(scaledWidth,0f); // bottom groundBox.setAsEdge(bottomLeft, bottomRight); groundBody.createFixture(groundBox,0); // top groundBox.setAsEdge(topLeft, topRight); groundBody.createFixture(groundBox,0); // left groundBox.setAsEdge(topLeft, bottomLeft); groundBody.createFixture(groundBox,0); // right groundBox.setAsEdge(topRight, bottomRight); groundBody.createFixture(groundBox,0); CCSprite floorbg = CCSprite.sprite("grassbehind.png"); addChild(floorbg,1); floorbg.setAnchorPoint(0,0); floorbg.setPosition(0,0); CCSprite floorfront = CCSprite.sprite("grassfront.png"); floorfront.setTag(2); this.addBoxBodyForSprite(floorfront); addChild(floorfront,3); floorfront.setAnchorPoint(0,0); floorfront.setPosition(0,0); addChild(danceSheet); //CCSprite monkey = CCSprite.sprite(danceSheet, CGRect.make(0, 0, 48, 73)); //addChild(danceSprite); monkey = CCSprite.sprite("arms_up.png"); monkey.setTag(2); monkey.setPosition(200,100); BodyDef spriteBodyDef = new BodyDef(); spriteBodyDef.type = BodyType.DynamicBody; spriteBodyDef.bullet=true; spriteBodyDef.position.set(200 / PTM_RATIO, 300 / PTM_RATIO); monkey_body = _world.createBody(spriteBodyDef); monkey_body.setUserData(monkey); PolygonShape spriteShape = new PolygonShape(); spriteShape.setAsBox(monkey.getContentSize().width/PTM_RATIO/2, monkey.getContentSize().height/PTM_RATIO/2); FixtureDef spriteShapeDef = new FixtureDef(); spriteShapeDef.shape = spriteShape; spriteShapeDef.density = 2.0f; spriteShapeDef.friction = 0.70f; spriteShapeDef.restitution = 0.0f; monkey_body.createFixture(spriteShapeDef); //Vector2 force = new Vector2(10, 10); //monkey_body.applyLinearImpulse(force, spriteBodyDef.position); addChild(monkey,10000); this.schedule(tickCallback); this.schedule(createobjects, 2.0f); objectHint = CCColorLayer.node(ccColor4B.ccc4(255,0,0,128), 200f, 100f); addChild(objectHint, 15000); objectHint.setVisible(false); _world.setContactListener(_contactListener); } private UpdateCallback tickCallback = new UpdateCallback() { public void update(float d) { tick(d); } }; private UpdateCallback createobjects = new UpdateCallback() { public void update(float d) { secondUpdate(d); } }; private void secondUpdate(float dt) { this.addNewSprite(); } public void addBoxBodyForSprite(CCSprite sprite) { BodyDef spriteBodyDef = new BodyDef(); spriteBodyDef.type = BodyType.StaticBody; //spriteBodyDef.bullet=true; spriteBodyDef.position.set(sprite.getPosition().x / PTM_RATIO, sprite.getPosition().y / PTM_RATIO); spriteBody = _world.createBody(spriteBodyDef); spriteBody.setUserData(sprite); Vector2 verts[] = { new Vector2(-11.8f / PTM_RATIO, -24.5f / PTM_RATIO), new Vector2(11.7f / PTM_RATIO, -24.0f / PTM_RATIO), new Vector2(29.2f / PTM_RATIO, -14.0f / PTM_RATIO), new Vector2(28.7f / PTM_RATIO, -0.7f / PTM_RATIO), new Vector2(8.0f / PTM_RATIO, 18.2f / PTM_RATIO), new Vector2(-29.0f / PTM_RATIO, 18.7f / PTM_RATIO), new Vector2(-26.3f / PTM_RATIO, -12.2f / PTM_RATIO) }; PolygonShape spriteShape = new PolygonShape(); spriteShape.set(verts); //spriteShape.setAsBox(sprite.getContentSize().width/PTM_RATIO/2, //sprite.getContentSize().height/PTM_RATIO/2); FixtureDef spriteShapeDef = new FixtureDef(); spriteShapeDef.shape = spriteShape; spriteShapeDef.density = 2.0f; spriteShapeDef.friction = 0.70f; spriteShapeDef.restitution = 0.0f; spriteShapeDef.isSensor=true; spriteBody.createFixture(spriteShapeDef); } public void addNewSprite() { count=0; Random rand = new Random(); int Number = rand.nextInt(10); switch(Number) { case 0: _block = CCSprite.sprite("banana.png"); break; case 1: _block = CCSprite.sprite("backpack.png");break; case 2: _block = CCSprite.sprite("statue.png");break; case 3: _block = CCSprite.sprite("pineapple.png");break; case 4: _block = CCSprite.sprite("bananabunch.png");break; case 5: _block = CCSprite.sprite("hat.png");break; case 6: _block = CCSprite.sprite("canteen.png");break; case 7: _block = CCSprite.sprite("banana.png");break; case 8: _block = CCSprite.sprite("statue.png");break; case 9: _block = CCSprite.sprite("hat.png");break; } int padding=20; //_block.setPosition(CGPoint.make(100, 100)); // Determine where to spawn the target along the Y axis CGSize winSize = CCDirector.sharedDirector().displaySize(); int minY = (int)(_block.getContentSize().width / 2.0f); int maxY = (int)(winSize.width - _block.getContentSize().width / 2.0f); int rangeY = maxY - minY; int actualY = rand.nextInt(rangeY) + minY; // Create block and add it to the layer float xOffset = padding+_block.getContentSize().width/2+((_block.getContentSize().width+padding)*count); _block.setPosition(CGPoint.make(actualY, 750)); _block.setTag(1); float w = _block.getContentSize().width; objectHint.setVisible(true); objectHint.changeWidth(w); objectHint.setPosition(actualY-w/2, 460); this.addChild(_block,10000); // Create ball body and shape BodyDef ballBodyDef1 = new BodyDef(); ballBodyDef1.type = BodyType.DynamicBody; ballBodyDef1.position.set(actualY/PTM_RATIO, 480/PTM_RATIO); bodies = _world.createBody(ballBodyDef1); bodies.setUserData(_block); PolygonShape circle1 = new PolygonShape(); Vector2 verts[] = { new Vector2(-11.8f / PTM_RATIO, -24.5f / PTM_RATIO), new Vector2(11.7f / PTM_RATIO, -24.0f / PTM_RATIO), new Vector2(29.2f / PTM_RATIO, -14.0f / PTM_RATIO), new Vector2(28.7f / PTM_RATIO, -0.7f / PTM_RATIO), new Vector2(8.0f / PTM_RATIO, 18.2f / PTM_RATIO), new Vector2(-29.0f / PTM_RATIO, 18.7f / PTM_RATIO), new Vector2(-26.3f / PTM_RATIO, -12.2f / PTM_RATIO) }; circle1.set(verts); FixtureDef ballShapeDef1 = new FixtureDef(); ballShapeDef1.shape = circle1; ballShapeDef1.density = 10.0f; ballShapeDef1.friction = 0.0f; ballShapeDef1.restitution = 0.1f; bodies.createFixture(ballShapeDef1); count++; //Remove(); } @Override public void ccAccelerometerChanged(float accelX, float accelY, float accelZ) { //Apply the directional impulse /*float impulse = monkey_body.getMass()*accelY*WALK_FACTOR; Vector2 force = new Vector2(impulse, 0); monkey_body.applyLinearImpulse(force, monkey_body.getWorldCenter());*/ walk(accelY); //Remove(); } private void walk(float accelY) { // TODO Auto-generated method stub direction = accelY; } private void Remove() { for (Iterator<MyContact> it1 = _contactListener.mContacts.iterator(); it1.hasNext();) { MyContact contact = it1.next(); Body bodyA = contact.fixtureA.getBody(); Body bodyB = contact.fixtureB.getBody(); // See if there's any user data attached to the Box2D body // There should be, since we set it in addBoxBodyForSprite if (bodyA.getUserData() != null && bodyB.getUserData() != null) { CCSprite spriteA = (CCSprite) bodyA.getUserData(); CCSprite spriteB = (CCSprite) bodyB.getUserData(); // Is sprite A a cat and sprite B a car? If so, push the cat // on a list to be destroyed... if (spriteA.getTag() == 1 && spriteB.getTag() == 2) { //Log.v("dsfds", "dsfsd"+bodyA); //_world.destroyBody(bodyA); // removeChild(spriteA, true); toDestroy.add(bodyA); } // Is sprite A a car and sprite B a cat? If so, push the cat // on a list to be destroyed... else if (spriteA.getTag() == 2 && spriteB.getTag() == 1) { //Log.v("dsfds", "dsfsd"+bodyB); toDestroy.add(bodyB); } } } // Loop through all of the box2d bodies we want to destroy... for (Iterator<Body> it1 = toDestroy.iterator(); it1.hasNext();) { Body body = it1.next(); // See if there's any user data attached to the Box2D body // There should be, since we set it in addBoxBodyForSprite if (body.getUserData() != null) { // We know that the user data is a sprite since we set // it that way, so cast it... CCSprite sprite = (CCSprite) body.getUserData(); // Remove the sprite from the scene _world.destroyBody(body); removeChild(sprite, true); } // Destroy the Box2D body as well // _contactListener.mContacts.remove(0); } } public synchronized void tick(float delta) { synchronized (_world) { _world.step(delta, 8, 3); //_world.clearForces(); //addNewSprite(); } CCAnimation danceAnimation = CCAnimation.animation("dance", 1.0f); // Iterate over the bodies in the physics world Iterator<Body> it = _world.getBodies(); while(it.hasNext()) { Body b = it.next(); Object userData = b.getUserData(); if (userData != null && userData instanceof CCSprite) { //Synchronize the Sprites position and rotation with the corresponding body CCSprite sprite = (CCSprite)userData; if(sprite.getTag()==1) { //b.applyLinearImpulse(force, pos); sprite.setPosition(b.getPosition().x * PTM_RATIO, b.getPosition().y * PTM_RATIO); sprite.setRotation(-1.0f * ccMacros.CC_RADIANS_TO_DEGREES(b.getAngle())); } else { //Apply the directional impulse float impulse = monkey_body.getMass()*direction*WALK_FACTOR; Vector2 force = new Vector2(impulse, 0); b.applyLinearImpulse(force, b.getWorldCenter()); sprite.setPosition(b.getPosition().x * PTM_RATIO, b.getPosition().y * PTM_RATIO); animDelay -= 1.0f/60.0f; if(animDelay <= 0) { animDelay = ANIM_SPEED; animPhase++; if(animPhase > 2) { animPhase = 1; } } if(direction < 0 ) { isLeft=1; } else { isLeft=0; } if(isLeft==1) { dir = "left"; } else { dir = "right"; } float standingLimit = (float) 0.1f; float vX = monkey_body.getLinearVelocity().x; if((vX > -standingLimit)&& (vX < standingLimit)) { // Log.v("sasd", "standing"); } else { } } } } Remove(); } } Sorry for my english. Thanks in advance.

  Read the article

• Help:Graph contest problem: maybe a modified Dijkstra or another alternative algorithm

  - by newba

  Hi you all, I'm trying to do this contest exercise about graphs: XPTO is an intrepid adventurer (a little too temerarious for his own good) who boasts about exploring every corner of the universe, no matter how inhospitable. In fact, he doesn't visit the planets where people can easily live in, he prefers those where only a madman would go with a very good reason (several millions of credits for instance). His latest exploit is trying to survive in Proxima III. The problem is that Proxima III suffers from storms of highly corrosive acids that destroy everything, including spacesuits that were especially designed to withstand corrosion. Our intrepid explorer was caught in a rectangular area in the middle of one of these storms. Fortunately, he has an instrument that is capable of measuring the exact concentration of acid on each sector and how much damage it does to his spacesuit. Now, he only needs to find out if he can escape the storm. Problem The problem consists of finding an escape route that will allow XPTOto escape the noxious storm. You are given the initial energy of the spacesuit, the size of the rectangular area and the damage that the spacesuit will suffer while standing in each sector. Your task is to find the exit sector, the number of steps necessary to reach it and the amount of energy his suit will have when he leaves the rectangular area. The escape route chosen should be the safest one (i.e., the one where his spacesuit will be the least damaged). Notice that Rodericus will perish if the energy of his suit reaches zero. In case there are more than one possible solutions, choose the one that uses the least number of steps. If there are at least two sectors with the same number of steps (X1, Y1) and (X2, Y2) then choose the first if X1 < X2 or if X1 = X2 and Y1 < Y2. Constraints 0 < E = 30000 the suit's starting energy 0 = W = 500 the rectangle's width 0 = H = 500 rectangle's height 0 < X < W the starting X position 0 < Y < H the starting Y position 0 = D = 10000 the damage sustained in each sector Input The first number given is the number of test cases. Each case will consist of a line with the integers E, X and Y. The following line will have the integers W and H. The following lines will hold the matrix containing the damage D the spacesuit will suffer whilst in the corresponding sector. Notice that, as is often the case for computer geeks, (1,1) corresponds to the upper left corner. Output If there is a solution, the output will be the remaining energy, the exit sector's X and Y coordinates and the number of steps of the route that will lead Rodericus to safety. In case there is no solution, the phrase Goodbye cruel world! will be written. Sample Input 3 40 3 3 7 8 12 11 12 11 3 12 12 12 11 11 12 2 1 13 11 11 12 2 13 2 14 10 11 13 3 2 1 12 10 11 13 13 11 12 13 12 12 11 13 11 13 12 13 12 12 11 11 11 11 13 13 10 10 13 11 12 8 3 4 7 6 4 3 3 2 2 3 2 2 5 2 2 2 3 3 2 1 2 2 3 2 2 4 3 3 2 2 4 1 3 1 4 3 2 3 1 2 2 3 3 0 3 4 10 3 4 7 6 3 3 1 2 2 1 0 2 2 2 4 2 2 5 2 2 1 3 0 2 2 2 2 1 3 3 4 2 3 4 4 3 1 1 3 1 2 2 4 2 2 1 Sample Output 12 5 1 8 Goodbye cruel world! 5 1 4 2 Basically, I think we have to do a modified Dijkstra, in which the distance between nodes is the suit's energy (and we have to subtract it instead of suming up like is normal with distances) and the steps are the ....steps made along the path. The pos with the bester binomial (Energy,num_Steps) is our "way out". Important : XPTO obviously can't move in diagonals, so we have to cut out this cases. I have many ideas, but I have such a problem implementing them... Could someone please help me thinking about this with some code or, at least, ideas? Am I totally wrong?

  Read the article

• Trying to get these list items to display inline

  - by Joel

  I have several unordered lists that I want to display like this: <ul> <li><img></li> <li><p></li> //inline </ul> //linebreak <ul> <li><img></li> <li><p></li> //inline </ul> ...etc I'm not able to get the li items to be inline with eachother. They are stacking vertically. I have stripped away most styling but still can't figure out what I'm doing wrong: html: <ul class="instrument"> <li class="imagebox"><img src="/images/matepe.jpg" width="247" height="228" alt="Matepe" /></li> <li class="textbox"><p>The matepe is a 24 key instrument that is played by the Kore-Kore people in North-Eastern Zimbabwe and Mozambique. It utilizes four fingers-each playing an individual melody. These melodies also interwieve to create resultant melodies that can be manipulated thru accenting different fingers. The matepe is used in Rattletree as the bridge from the physical world to the spirit world. The matepe is used in the Kore-Kore culture to summon the Mhondoro spirits which are thought to be able to communicate directly with Mwari (God) without the need of an intermediary.</p></li> </ul> <ul class="instrument"> <li class="imagebox"><img src="/images/soprano_little.jpg" border="0" width="247" height="170" alt="Soprano" /></li> <li class="textbox"><p>The highest voice of the Rattletree Marimba orchestra is the Soprano marimba. The soprano is used to whip up the energy on the dancefloor and help people reach ecstatic state with it's high and clear singing voice. The range of these sopranos goes much lower than 'typical' Zimbabwean style sopranos. The sopranos play the range of the right hand of the matepe and go two notes higher and five notes lower. Rattletree uses two sopranos.</p></li> </ul> <ul class="instrument"> <li class="imagebox"><img src="/images/bari_little.jpg" border="0" width="247" height="170" alt="Baritone" /></li> <li class="textbox"><p>The Baritone is the next lower voice in the orchestra. The bari is where the funk is. Generally bubbling over the Bass line, the baritone creates the syncopations and polyrhythms that messes with the 'minds' of the dancers and helps seperate the listener from the physical realm of thought. The range of the baritone covers the full range of the left hand side of the matepe.</p></li> </ul> <ul class="instrument"> <li class="imagebox"><img src="/images/darren_littlebass.jpg" border="0" width="247" height="195" alt="Bass"/><strong>Bass Marimba</strong></li> <li class="textbox"><p>The towering Bass Marimba is the foundation of the Rattletree Marimba sound. Putting out frequencies as low as 22hZ, the bass creates the drive that gets the dancefloor moving. It is 5.5' tall, 9' long, and 4' deep. It is played by standing on a platform and struck with mallets that have lacross-ball size heads (they are actually made with rubber dog balls). The Bass marimba's range covers the lowest five notes of the matepe and goes another five notes lower.</p></li> </ul> <ul class="instrument"> <li class="imagebox"><img src="/images/wayne_little.jpg" border="0" width="247" height="177" alt="Drums"/><strong>Drumset</strong></li> <li class="textbox"><p>All the intricate polyrhythms are held together tastefully with the drumset. The drums provides the consistancy and grounding that the dancers need to keep going all night. While the steady kick and high-hat provide that grounding function, the toms and snare and allowed to be another voice in the poylrhythmic texture-helping the dancers abandon the concept of a "one" within this cyclical music.</p></li> </ul> css: ul.instrument { text-align:left; display:inline; } ul.instrument li { list-style-type: none; } li.imagebox { } li.textbox { } li.textbox p{ width: 247px; }

  Read the article

• Can't get Zend Studio and PHPunit to work together

  - by dimbo

  I have a created a simple doctrine2/zend skeleton project and am trying to get unit testing working with zend studio. The tests work perfectly through the PHPunit CLI but I just can't get them to work in zend studio. It comes up with an error saying : 'No Tests was executed' and the following output in the debug window : X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.14 ZendServer/5.0 Set-Cookie: ZendDebuggerCookie=127.0.0.1%3A10137%3A0||084|77742D65|1016; path=/ Content-type: text/html <br /> <b>Warning</b>: Unexpected character in input: '\' (ASCII=92) state=1 in <b>/var/www/z2d2/tests/application/models/UserModelTest.php</b> on line <b>8</b><br /> <br /> <b>Warning</b>: Unexpected character in input: '\' (ASCII=92) state=1 in <b>/var/www/z2d2/tests/application/models/UserModelTest.php</b> on line <b>8</b><br /> <br /> <b>Parse error</b>: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING in <b>/var/www/z2d2/tests/application/models/UserModelTest.php</b> on line <b>8</b><br /> The test is as follows: <?php require_once 'Zend/Application.php'; require_once 'Zend/Test/PHPUnit/ControllerTestCase.php'; abstract class ControllerTestCase extends Zend_Test_PHPUnit_ControllerTestCase { public function setUp() { $this->bootstrap = new Zend_Application( 'testing', APPLICATION_PATH . '/configs/application.ini' ); parent::setUp(); } public function tearDown() { parent::tearDown(); } } <?php class IndexControllerTest extends ControllerTestCase { public function testDoesHomePageExist() { $this->dispatch('/'); $this->assertController('index'); $this->assertAction('index'); } } <?php class ModelTestCase extends PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase { protected $em; public function setUp() { $application = new Zend_Application( 'testing', APPLICATION_PATH . '/configs/application.ini' ); $bootstrap = $application->bootstrap()->getBootstrap(); $this->em = $bootstrap->getResource('entityManager'); parent::setUp(); } public function tearDown() { parent::tearDown(); } } <?php class UserModelTest extends ModelTestCase { public function testCanInstantiateUser() { $this->assertInstanceOf('\Entities\User', new \Entities\User); } public function testCanSaveAndRetrieveUser() { $user = new \Entities\User; $user->setFirstname('wjgilmore-test'); $user->setemail('[email protected]'); $user->setpassword('jason'); $user->setAddress1('calle san antonio'); $user->setAddress2('albayzin'); $user->setSurname('testman'); $user->setConfirmed(TRUE); $this->em->persist($user); $this->em->flush(); $user = $this->em->getRepository('Entities\User')->findOneByFirstname('wjgilmore-test'); $this->assertEquals('wjgilmore-test', $user->getFirstname()); } public function testCanDeleteUser() { $user = new \Entities\User; $user = $this->em->getRepository('Entities\User')->findOneByFirstname('wjgilmore-test'); $this->em->remove($user); $this->em->flush(); } } And the bootstrap: <?php define('BASE_PATH', realpath(dirname(__FILE__) . '/../../')); define('APPLICATION_PATH', BASE_PATH . '/application'); set_include_path( '.' . PATH_SEPARATOR . BASE_PATH . '/library' . PATH_SEPARATOR . get_include_path() ); require_once 'controllers/ControllerTestCase.php'; require_once 'models/ModelTestCase.php'; Here is the new error after setting PHP Executable to 5.3 as Gordon suggested: X-Powered-By: PHP/5.3.3 ZendServer/5.0 Set-Cookie: ZendDebuggerCookie=127.0.0.1%3A10137%3A0||084|77742D65|1000; path=/ Content-type: text/html <br /> <b>Fatal error</b>: Class 'ModelTestCase' not found in <b>/var/www/z2d2/tests/application/models/UserModelTest.php</b> on line <b>4</b><br />

  Read the article

• Jquery fade and swap an element when clicked which will also relate to an accordian menu

  - by Nik

  You will notice when you click posture 1 the description drops down and images appear on the right. Now when you click posture 2 or posture 3 the images and description change as they should. What I need to do now is - If posture 1 has been clicked and then posture 2 is clicked the posture 1 menu needs to close so that there is only one posture description visible at one time. If I could also make it so that if the current open posture item is clicked so that it closes and there are no open posture descriptions that there also no images displayed on the right. Finally is there a way to make sure only one set of animation images is running, because just say the user goes through all 26 options and they continue to run in the background it may get sluggish (thanks to Nick Craver for bringing that up). At this stage only posture 1, 2 and 3 are available. Ok finally some code - //Description drop-down boxes $(document).ready(function(){ //Hide (Collapse) the toggle containers on load $(".toggle_container").hide(); //Switch the "Open" and "Close" state per click $("h5.trigger").toggle(function(){ $(this).addClass("active"); }, function () { $(this).removeClass("active"); }); //Slide up and down on click $("h5.trigger").click(function(){ $(this).next(".toggle_container").slideToggle("slow"); }); }); //Images on the right fade in and out thanks to aSeptik $(document).ready(function(){ $('#section_Q_01,#section_Q_02,#section_Q_03').hide(); $(function() { $('h5.trigger a').click( function(e) { e.preventDefault(); var trigger_id = $(this).parent().attr('id'); //get id Q_## $('.current').removeClass('current').hide(); //add a class for easy access & hide $('#section_' + trigger_id).addClass('current').fadeIn(5000); //show clicked one }); }); }); //Fading pics $(document).ready(function(){ $('.pics').cycle({ fx: 'fade', speed: 2500 }); }); Description boxes - <h5 class="trigger" id="Q_01" ><a href="#">Posture 1 : Standing Deep Breathing :</a></h5> <div class="toggle_container" > <div class="block"> <span class="sc">Pranayama Series</span> <p class="bold">Benefits:</p> </div> </div> <h5 class="trigger" id="Q_02" ><a href="#">Posture 2 : Half Moon Pose With Hands To Feet Pose :</a></h5> <div class="toggle_container"> <div class="block"> <span class="sc">Ardha Chandrasana with Pada-Hastasana</span> <p class="bold">Benefits:</p> </div> </div> <h5 class="trigger" id="Q_03" ><a href="#">Posture 3 : Awkward Pose :</a></h5> <div class="toggle_container"> <div class="block"> <span class="sc">Utkatasana</span> <p class="bold">Benefits:</p> </div> </div> and the images on the right - <div id="section_Q_01" class="01"> <div class="pics"> <img src="../images/multi/poses/pose1/Pranayama._01.jpg"/> <img src="../images/multi/poses/pose1/Pranayama._02.jpg"/> <img src="../images/multi/poses/pose1/Pranayama._03.jpg"/> </div> </div> <div id="section_Q_02" class="02"> <div class="pics"> <img src="../images/multi/poses/pose2/Half_Moon_Pose_04.jpg" /> <img src="../images/multi/poses/pose2/Backward_Bending_05.jpg" /> <img src="../images/multi/poses/pose2/Hands_to_Feet_Pose_06.jpg" /> </div> </div> <div id="section_Q_03" class="03"> <div class="pics"> <img src="../images/multi/poses/pose3/Awkward_01.jpg" /> <img src="../images/multi/poses/pose3/Awkward_02.jpg" /> <img src="../images/multi/poses/pose3/Awkward_03.jpg" /> </div> </div> It would be a bonus if images faded out when another element is clicked... but not a big deal. Thanks for having a look

  Read the article

• e2fsck extremely slow, although enough memory exists

  - by kaefert

  I've got this external USB-Disk: kaefert@blechmobil:~$ lsusb -s 2:3 Bus 002 Device 003: ID 0bc2:3320 Seagate RSS LLC As can be seen in this dmesg output, there is some problem that prevents that disk from beeing mounted: kaefert@blechmobil:~$ dmesg ... [ 113.084079] usb 2-1: new high-speed USB device number 3 using ehci_hcd [ 113.217783] usb 2-1: New USB device found, idVendor=0bc2, idProduct=3320 [ 113.217787] usb 2-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=2, Product=3, SerialNumber=1 [ 113.217790] usb 2-1: Product: Expansion Desk [ 113.217792] usb 2-1: Manufacturer: Seagate [ 113.217794] usb 2-1: SerialNumber: NA4J4N6K [ 113.435404] usbcore: registered new interface driver uas [ 113.455315] Initializing USB Mass Storage driver... [ 113.468051] scsi5 : usb-storage 2-1:1.0 [ 113.468180] usbcore: registered new interface driver usb-storage [ 113.468182] USB Mass Storage support registered. [ 114.473105] scsi 5:0:0:0: Direct-Access Seagate Expansion Desk 070B PQ: 0 ANSI: 6 [ 114.474342] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] 732566645 4096-byte logical blocks: (3.00 TB/2.72 TiB) [ 114.475089] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off [ 114.475092] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 43 00 00 00 [ 114.475959] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA [ 114.477093] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] 732566645 4096-byte logical blocks: (3.00 TB/2.72 TiB) [ 114.501649] sdb: sdb1 [ 114.502717] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] 732566645 4096-byte logical blocks: (3.00 TB/2.72 TiB) [ 114.504354] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI disk [ 116.804408] EXT4-fs (sdb1): ext4_check_descriptors: Checksum for group 3976 failed (47397!=61519) [ 116.804413] EXT4-fs (sdb1): group descriptors corrupted! ... So I went and fired up my favorite partition manager - gparted, and told it to verify and repair the partition sdb1. This made gparted call e2fsck (version 1.42.4 (12-Jun-2012)) e2fsck -f -y -v /dev/sdb1 Although gparted called e2fsck with the "-v" option, sadly it doesn't show me the output of my e2fsck process (bugreport https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=467925 ) I started this whole thing on Sunday (2012-11-04_2200) evening, so about 48 hours ago, this is what htop says about it now (2012-11-06-1900): PID USER PRI NI VIRT RES SHR S CPU% MEM% TIME+ Command 3704 root 39 19 1560M 1166M 768 R 98.0 19.5 42h56:43 e2fsck -f -y -v /dev/sdb1 Now I found a few posts on the internet that discuss e2fsck running slow, for example: http://gparted-forum.surf4.info/viewtopic.php?id=13613 where they write that its a good idea to see if the disk is just that slow because maybe its damaged, and I think these outputs tell me that this is not the case in my case: kaefert@blechmobil:~$ sudo hdparm -tT /dev/sdb /dev/sdb: Timing cached reads: 3562 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1783.29 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 82 MB in 3.01 seconds = 27.26 MB/sec kaefert@blechmobil:~$ sudo hdparm /dev/sdb /dev/sdb: multcount = 0 (off) readonly = 0 (off) readahead = 256 (on) geometry = 364801/255/63, sectors = 5860533160, start = 0 However, although I can read quickly from that disk, this disk speed doesn't seem to be used by e2fsck, considering tools like gkrellm or iotop or this: kaefert@blechmobil:~$ iostat -x Linux 3.2.0-2-amd64 (blechmobil) 2012-11-06 _x86_64_ (2 CPU) avg-cpu: %user %nice %system %iowait %steal %idle 14,24 47,81 14,63 0,95 0,00 22,37 Device: rrqm/s wrqm/s r/s w/s rkB/s wkB/s avgrq-sz avgqu-sz await r_await w_await svctm %util sda 0,59 8,29 2,42 5,14 43,17 160,17 53,75 0,30 39,80 8,72 54,42 3,95 2,99 sdb 137,54 5,48 9,23 0,20 587,07 22,73 129,35 0,07 7,70 7,51 16,18 2,17 2,04 Now I researched a little bit on how to find out what e2fsck is doing with all that processor time, and I found the tool strace, which gives me this: kaefert@blechmobil:~$ sudo strace -p3704 lseek(4, 41026998272, SEEK_SET) = 41026998272 write(4, "\212\354K[_\361\3nl\212\245\352\255jR\303\354\312Yv\334p\253r\217\265\3567\325\257\3766"..., 4096) = 4096 lseek(4, 48404766720, SEEK_SET) = 48404766720 read(4, "\7t\260\366\346\337\304\210\33\267j\35\377'\31f\372\252\ffU\317.y\211\360\36\240c\30`\34"..., 4096) = 4096 lseek(4, 41027002368, SEEK_SET) = 41027002368 write(4, "\232]7Ws\321\352\t\1@[+5\263\334\276{\343zZx\352\21\316`1\271[\202\350R`"..., 4096) = 4096 lseek(4, 48404770816, SEEK_SET) = 48404770816 read(4, "\17\362r\230\327\25\346//\210H\v\311\3237\323K\304\306\361a\223\311\324\272?\213\tq \370\24"..., 4096) = 4096 lseek(4, 41027006464, SEEK_SET) = 41027006464 write(4, "\367yy>x\216?=\324Z\305\351\376&\25\244\210\271\22\306}\276\237\370(\214\205G\262\360\257#"..., 4096) = 4096 lseek(4, 48404774912, SEEK_SET) = 48404774912 read(4, "\365\25\0\21|T\0\21}3t_\272\373\222k\r\177\303\1\201\261\221$\261B\232\3142\21U\316"..., 4096) = 4096 ^CProcess 3704 detached around 16 of these lines every second, so 4 read and 4 write operations every second, which I don't consider to be a lot.. And finally, my question: Will this process ever finish? If those numbers from fseek (48404774912) represent bytes, that would be something like 45 gigabytes, with this beeing a 3 terrabyte disk, which would give me 134 days to go, if the speed stays constant, and e2fsck scans the disk like this completly and only once. Do you have some advice for me? I have most of the data on that disk elsewhere, but I've put a lot of hours into sorting and merging it to this disk, so I would prefer to getting this disk up and running again, without formatting it anew. I don't think that the hardware is damaged since the disk is only a few months and since I can't see any I/O errors in the dmesg output. UPDATE: I just looked at the strace output again (2012-11-06_2300), now it looks like this: lseek(4, 1419860611072, SEEK_SET) = 1419860611072 read(4, "3#\f\2447\335\0\22A\355\374\276j\204'\207|\217V|\23\245[\7VP\251\242\276\207\317:"..., 4096) = 4096 lseek(4, 43018145792, SEEK_SET) = 43018145792 write(4, "]\206\231\342Y\204-2I\362\242\344\6R\205\361\324\177\265\317C\334V\324\260\334\275t=\10F."..., 4096) = 4096 lseek(4, 1419860615168, SEEK_SET) = 1419860615168 read(4, "\262\305\314Y\367\37x\326\245\226\226\320N\333$s\34\204\311\222\7\315\236\336\300TK\337\264\236\211n"..., 4096) = 4096 lseek(4, 43018149888, SEEK_SET) = 43018149888 write(4, "\271\224m\311\224\25!I\376\16;\377\0\223H\25Yd\201Y\342\r\203\271\24eG<\202{\373V"..., 4096) = 4096 lseek(4, 1419860619264, SEEK_SET) = 1419860619264 read(4, ";d\360\177\n\346\253\210\222|\250\352T\335M\33\260\320\261\7g\222P\344H?t\240\20\2548\310"..., 4096) = 4096 lseek(4, 43018153984, SEEK_SET) = 43018153984 write(4, "\360\252j\317\310\251G\227\335{\214`\341\267\31Y\202\360\v\374\307oq\3063\217Z\223\313\36D\211"..., 4096) = 4096 So the numbers in the lseek lines before the reads, like 1419860619264 are already a lot bigger, standing for 1.29 terabytes if those numbers are bytes, so it doesn't seem to be a linear progress on a big scale, maybe there are only some areas that need work, that have big gaps in between them. UPDATE2: Okey, big disappointment, the numbers are back to very small again (2012-11-07_0720) lseek(4, 52174548992, SEEK_SET) = 52174548992 read(4, "\374\312\22\\\325\215\213\23\0357U\222\246\370v^f(\312|f\212\362\343\375\373\342\4\204mU6"..., 4096) = 4096 lseek(4, 46603526144, SEEK_SET) = 46603526144 write(4, "\370\261\223\227\23?\4\4\217\264\320_Am\246CQ\313^\203U\253\274\204\277\2564n\227\177\267\343"..., 4096) = 4096 so either e2fsck goes over the data multiple times, or it just hops back and forth multiple times. Or my assumption that those numbers are bytes is wrong. UPDATE3: Since it's mentioned here http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=282125&page=2 that you can testisk while e2fsck is running, i tried that, though not with a lot of success. When asking testdisk to display the data of my partition, this is what I get: TestDisk 6.13, Data Recovery Utility, November 2011 Christophe GRENIER <[email protected]> http://www.cgsecurity.org 1 P Linux 0 4 5 45600 40 8 732566272 Can't open filesystem. Filesystem seems damaged. And this is what strace currently gives me (2012-11-07_1030) lseek(4, 212460343296, SEEK_SET) = 212460343296 read(4, "\315Mb\265v\377Gn \24\f\205EHh\2349~\330\273\203\3375\206\10\r3=W\210\372\352"..., 4096) = 4096 lseek(4, 47347830784, SEEK_SET) = 47347830784 write(4, "]\204\223\300I\357\4\26\33+\243\312G\230\250\371*m2U\t_\215\265J \252\342Pm\360D"..., 4096) = 4096 (times are in CET)

  Read the article

• VS 2010 SP1 and SQL CE

  - by ScottGu

  Last month we released the Beta of VS 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1).  You can learn more about the VS 2010 SP1 Beta from Jason Zander’s two blog posts about it, and from Scott Hanselman’s blog post that covers some of the new capabilities enabled with it.   You can download and install the VS 2010 SP1 Beta here. Last week I blogged about the new Visual Studio support for IIS Express that we are adding with VS 2010 SP1. In today’s post I’m going to talk about the new VS 2010 SP1 tooling support for SQL CE, and walkthrough some of the cool scenarios it enables.  SQL CE – What is it and why should you care? SQL CE is a free, embedded, database engine that enables easy database storage. No Database Installation Required SQL CE does not require you to run a setup or install a database server in order to use it.  You can simply copy the SQL CE binaries into the \bin directory of your ASP.NET application, and then your web application can use it as a database engine.  No setup or extra security permissions are required for it to run. You do not need to have an administrator account on the machine. Just copy your web application onto any server and it will work. This is true even of medium-trust applications running in a web hosting environment. SQL CE runs in-memory within your ASP.NET application and will start-up when you first access a SQL CE database, and will automatically shutdown when your application is unloaded.  SQL CE databases are stored as files that live within the \App_Data folder of your ASP.NET Applications. Works with Existing Data APIs SQL CE 4 works with existing .NET-based data APIs, and supports a SQL Server compatible query syntax.  This means you can use existing data APIs like ADO.NET, as well as use higher-level ORMs like Entity Framework and NHibernate with SQL CE.  This enables you to use the same data programming skills and data APIs you know today. Supports Development, Testing and Production Scenarios SQL CE can be used for development scenarios, testing scenarios, and light production usage scenarios.  With the SQL CE 4 release we’ve done the engineering work to ensure that SQL CE won’t crash or deadlock when used in a multi-threaded server scenario (like ASP.NET).  This is a big change from previous releases of SQL CE – which were designed for client-only scenarios and which explicitly blocked running in web-server environments.  Starting with SQL CE 4 you can use it in a web-server as well. There are no license restrictions with SQL CE.  It is also totally free. Easy Migration to SQL Server SQL CE is an embedded database – which makes it ideal for development, testing, and light-usage scenarios.  For high-volume sites and applications you’ll probably want to migrate your database to use SQL Server Express (which is free), SQL Server or SQL Azure.  These servers enable much better scalability, more development features (including features like Stored Procedures – which aren’t supported with SQL CE), as well as more advanced data management capabilities. We’ll ship migration tools that enable you to optionally take SQL CE databases and easily upgrade them to use SQL Server Express, SQL Server, or SQL Azure.  You will not need to change your code when upgrading a SQL CE database to SQL Server or SQL Azure.  Our goal is to enable you to be able to simply change the database connection string in your web.config file and have your application just work. New Tooling Support for SQL CE in VS 2010 SP1 VS 2010 SP1 includes much improved tooling support for SQL CE, and adds support for using SQL CE within ASP.NET projects for the first time.  With VS 2010 SP1 you can now: Create new SQL CE Databases Edit and Modify SQL CE Database Schema and Indexes Populate SQL CE Databases within Data Use the Entity Framework (EF) designer to create model layers against SQL CE databases Use EF Code First to define model layers in code, then create a SQL CE database from them, and optionally edit the DB with VS Deploy SQL CE databases to remote servers using Web Deploy and optionally convert them to full SQL Server databases You can take advantage of all of the above features from within both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC based projects. Download You can enable SQL CE tooling support within VS 2010 by first installing VS 2010 SP1 (beta). Once SP1 is installed, you’ll also then need to install the SQL CE Tools for Visual Studio download.  This is a separate download that enables the SQL CE tooling support for VS 2010 SP1. Walkthrough of Two Scenarios In this blog post I’m going to walkthrough how you can take advantage of SQL CE and VS 2010 SP1 using both an ASP.NET Web Forms and an ASP.NET MVC based application. Specifically, we’ll walkthrough: How to create a SQL CE database using VS 2010 SP1, then use the EF4 visual designers in Visual Studio to construct a model layer from it, and then display and edit the data using an ASP.NET GridView control. How to use an EF Code First approach to define a model layer using POCO classes and then have EF Code-First “auto-create” a SQL CE database for us based on our model classes.  We’ll then look at how we can use the new VS 2010 SP1 support for SQL CE to inspect the database that was created, populate it with data, and later make schema changes to it.  We’ll do all this within the context of an ASP.NET MVC based application. You can follow the two walkthroughs below on your own machine by installing VS 2010 SP1 (beta) and then installing the SQL CE Tools for Visual Studio download (which is a separate download that enables SQL CE tooling support for VS 2010 SP1). Walkthrough 1: Create a SQL CE Database, Create EF Model Classes, Edit the Data with a GridView This first walkthrough will demonstrate how to create and define a SQL CE database within an ASP.NET Web Form application.  We’ll then build an EF model layer for it and use that model layer to enable data editing scenarios with an <asp:GridView> control. Step 1: Create a new ASP.NET Web Forms Project We’ll begin by using the File->New Project menu command within Visual Studio to create a new ASP.NET Web Forms project.  We’ll use the “ASP.NET Web Application” project template option so that it has a default UI skin implemented: Step 2: Create a SQL CE Database Right click on the “App_Data” folder within the created project and choose the “Add->New Item” menu command: This will bring up the “Add Item” dialog box.  Select the “SQL Server Compact 4.0 Local Database” item (new in VS 2010 SP1) and name the database file to create “Store.sdf”: Note that SQL CE database files have a .sdf filename extension. Place them within the /App_Data folder of your ASP.NET application to enable easy deployment. When we clicked the “Add” button above a Store.sdf file was added to our project: Step 3: Adding a “Products” Table Double-clicking the “Store.sdf” database file will open it up within the Server Explorer tab.  Since it is a new database there are no tables within it: Right click on the “Tables” icon and choose the “Create Table” menu command to create a new database table.  We’ll name the new table “Products” and add 4 columns to it.  We’ll mark the first column as a primary key (and make it an identify column so that its value will automatically increment with each new row): When we click “ok” our new Products table will be created in the SQL CE database. Step 4: Populate with Data Once our Products table is created it will show up within the Server Explorer.  We can right-click it and choose the “Show Table Data” menu command to edit its data: Let’s add a few sample rows of data to it: Step 5: Create an EF Model Layer We have a SQL CE database with some data in it – let’s now create an EF Model Layer that will provide a way for us to easily query and update data within it. Let’s right-click on our project and choose the “Add->New Item” menu command.  This will bring up the “Add New Item” dialog – select the “ADO.NET Entity Data Model” item within it and name it “Store.edmx” This will add a new Store.edmx item to our solution explorer and launch a wizard that allows us to quickly create an EF model: Select the “Generate From Database” option above and click next.  Choose to use the Store.sdf SQL CE database we just created and then click next again.  The wizard will then ask you what database objects you want to import into your model.  Let’s choose to import the “Products” table we created earlier: When we click the “Finish” button Visual Studio will open up the EF designer.  It will have a Product entity already on it that maps to the “Products” table within our SQL CE database: The VS 2010 SP1 EF designer works exactly the same with SQL CE as it does already with SQL Server and SQL Express.  The Product entity above will be persisted as a class (called “Product”) that we can programmatically work against within our ASP.NET application. Step 6: Compile the Project Before using your model layer you’ll need to build your project.  Do a Ctrl+Shift+B to compile the project, or use the Build->Build Solution menu command. Step 7: Create a Page that Uses our EF Model Layer Let’s now create a simple ASP.NET Web Form that contains a GridView control that we can use to display and edit the our Products data (via the EF Model Layer we just created). Right-click on the project and choose the Add->New Item command.  Select the “Web Form from Master Page” item template, and name the page you create “Products.aspx”.  Base the master page on the “Site.Master” template that is in the root of the project. Add an <h2>Products</h2> heading the new Page, and add an <asp:gridview> control within it: Then click the “Design” tab to switch into design-view. Select the GridView control, and then click the top-right corner to display the GridView’s “Smart Tasks” UI: Choose the “New data source…” drop down option above.  This will bring up the below dialog which allows you to pick your Data Source type: Select the “Entity” data source option – which will allow us to easily connect our GridView to the EF model layer we created earlier.  This will bring up another dialog that allows us to pick our model layer: Select the “StoreEntities” option in the dropdown – which is the EF model layer we created earlier.  Then click next – which will allow us to pick which entity within it we want to bind to: Select the “Products” entity in the above dialog – which indicates that we want to bind against the “Product” entity class we defined earlier.  Then click the “Enable automatic updates” checkbox to ensure that we can both query and update Products.  When you click “Finish” VS will wire-up an <asp:EntityDataSource> to your <asp:GridView> control: The last two steps we’ll do will be to click the “Enable Editing” checkbox on the Grid (which will cause the Grid to display an “Edit” link on each row) and (optionally) use the Auto Format dialog to pick a UI template for the Grid. Step 8: Run the Application Let’s now run our application and browse to the /Products.aspx page that contains our GridView.  When we do so we’ll see a Grid UI of the Products within our SQL CE database. Clicking the “Edit” link for any of the rows will allow us to edit their values: When we click “Update” the GridView will post back the values, persist them through our EF Model Layer, and ultimately save them within our SQL CE database. Learn More about using EF with ASP.NET Web Forms Read this tutorial series on the http://asp.net site to learn more about how to use EF with ASP.NET Web Forms.  The tutorial series uses SQL Express as the database – but the nice thing is that all of the same steps/concepts can also now also be done with SQL CE.   Walkthrough 2: Using EF Code-First with SQL CE and ASP.NET MVC 3 We used a database-first approach with the sample above – where we first created the database, and then used the EF designer to create model classes from the database.  In addition to supporting a designer-based development workflow, EF also enables a more code-centric option which we call “code first development”.  Code-First Development enables a pretty sweet development workflow.  It enables you to: Define your model objects by simply writing “plain old classes” with no base classes or visual designer required Use a “convention over configuration” approach that enables database persistence without explicitly configuring anything Optionally override the convention-based persistence and use a fluent code API to fully customize the persistence mapping Optionally auto-create a database based on the model classes you define – allowing you to start from code first I’ve done several blog posts about EF Code First in the past – I really think it is great.  The good news is that it also works very well with SQL CE. The combination of SQL CE, EF Code First, and the new VS tooling support for SQL CE, enables a pretty nice workflow.  Below is a simple example of how you can use them to build a simple ASP.NET MVC 3 application. Step 1: Create a new ASP.NET MVC 3 Project We’ll begin by using the File->New Project menu command within Visual Studio to create a new ASP.NET MVC 3 project.  We’ll use the “Internet Project” template so that it has a default UI skin implemented: Step 2: Use NuGet to Install EFCodeFirst Next we’ll use the NuGet package manager (automatically installed by ASP.NET MVC 3) to add the EFCodeFirst library to our project.  We’ll use the Package Manager command shell to do this.  Bring up the package manager console within Visual Studio by selecting the View->Other Windows->Package Manager Console menu command.  Then type: install-package EFCodeFirst within the package manager console to download the EFCodeFirst library and have it be added to our project: When we enter the above command, the EFCodeFirst library will be downloaded and added to our application: Step 3: Build Some Model Classes Using a “code first” based development workflow, we will create our model classes first (even before we have a database).  We create these model classes by writing code. For this sample, we will right click on the “Models” folder of our project and add the below three classes to our project: The “Dinner” and “RSVP” model classes above are “plain old CLR objects” (aka POCO).  They do not need to derive from any base classes or implement any interfaces, and the properties they expose are standard .NET data-types.  No data persistence attributes or data code has been added to them.   The “NerdDinners” class derives from the DbContext class (which is supplied by EFCodeFirst) and handles the retrieval/persistence of our Dinner and RSVP instances from a database. Step 4: Listing Dinners We’ve written all of the code necessary to implement our model layer for this simple project.  Let’s now expose and implement the URL: /Dinners/Upcoming within our project.  We’ll use it to list upcoming dinners that happen in the future. We’ll do this by right-clicking on our “Controllers” folder and select the “Add->Controller” menu command.  We’ll name the Controller we want to create “DinnersController”.  We’ll then implement an “Upcoming” action method within it that lists upcoming dinners using our model layer above.  We will use a LINQ query to retrieve the data and pass it to a View to render with the code below: We’ll then right-click within our Upcoming method and choose the “Add-View” menu command to create an “Upcoming” view template that displays our dinners.  We’ll use the “empty” template option within the “Add View” dialog and write the below view template using Razor: Step 4: Configure our Project to use a SQL CE Database We have finished writing all of our code – our last step will be to configure a database connection-string to use. We will point our NerdDinners model class to a SQL CE database by adding the below <connectionString> to the web.config file at the top of our project: EF Code First uses a default convention where context classes will look for a connection-string that matches the DbContext class name.  Because we created a “NerdDinners” class earlier, we’ve also named our connectionstring “NerdDinners”.  Above we are configuring our connection-string to use SQL CE as the database, and telling it that our SQL CE database file will live within the \App_Data directory of our ASP.NET project. Step 5: Running our Application Now that we’ve built our application, let’s run it! We’ll browse to the /Dinners/Upcoming URL – doing so will display an empty list of upcoming dinners: You might ask – but where did it query to get the dinners from? We didn’t explicitly create a database?!? One of the cool features that EF Code-First supports is the ability to automatically create a database (based on the schema of our model classes) when the database we point it at doesn’t exist.  Above we configured  EF Code-First to point at a SQL CE database in the \App_Data\ directory of our project.  When we ran our application, EF Code-First saw that the SQL CE database didn’t exist and automatically created it for us. Step 6: Using VS 2010 SP1 to Explore our newly created SQL CE Database Click the “Show all Files” icon within the Solution Explorer and you’ll see the “NerdDinners.sdf” SQL CE database file that was automatically created for us by EF code-first within the \App_Data\ folder: We can optionally right-click on the file and “Include in Project" to add it to our solution: We can also double-click the file (regardless of whether it is added to the project) and VS 2010 SP1 will open it as a database we can edit within the “Server Explorer” tab of the IDE. Below is the view we get when we double-click our NerdDinners.sdf SQL CE file.  We can drill in to see the schema of the Dinners and RSVPs tables in the tree explorer.  Notice how two tables - Dinners and RSVPs – were automatically created for us within our SQL CE database.  This was done by EF Code First when we accessed the NerdDinners class by running our application above: We can right-click on a Table and use the “Show Table Data” command to enter some upcoming dinners in our database: We’ll use the built-in editor that VS 2010 SP1 supports to populate our table data below: And now when we hit “refresh” on the /Dinners/Upcoming URL within our browser we’ll see some upcoming dinners show up: Step 7: Changing our Model and Database Schema Let’s now modify the schema of our model layer and database, and walkthrough one way that the new VS 2010 SP1 Tooling support for SQL CE can make this easier.  With EF Code-First you typically start making database changes by modifying the model classes.  For example, let’s add an additional string property called “UrlLink” to our “Dinner” class.  We’ll use this to point to a link for more information about the event: Now when we re-run our project, and visit the /Dinners/Upcoming URL we’ll see an error thrown: We are seeing this error because EF Code-First automatically created our database, and by default when it does this it adds a table that helps tracks whether the schema of our database is in sync with our model classes.  EF Code-First helpfully throws an error when they become out of sync – making it easier to track down issues at development time that you might otherwise only find (via obscure errors) at runtime.  Note that if you do not want this feature you can turn it off by changing the default conventions of your DbContext class (in this case our NerdDinners class) to not track the schema version. Our model classes and database schema are out of sync in the above example – so how do we fix this?  There are two approaches you can use today: Delete the database and have EF Code First automatically re-create the database based on the new model class schema (losing the data within the existing DB) Modify the schema of the existing database to make it in sync with the model classes (keeping/migrating the data within the existing DB) There are a couple of ways you can do the second approach above.  Below I’m going to show how you can take advantage of the new VS 2010 SP1 Tooling support for SQL CE to use a database schema tool to modify our database structure.  We are also going to be supporting a “migrations” feature with EF in the future that will allow you to automate/script database schema migrations programmatically. Step 8: Modify our SQL CE Database Schema using VS 2010 SP1 The new SQL CE Tooling support within VS 2010 SP1 makes it easy to modify the schema of our existing SQL CE database.  To do this we’ll right-click on our “Dinners” table and choose the “Edit Table Schema” command: This will bring up the below “Edit Table” dialog.  We can rename, change or delete any of the existing columns in our table, or click at the bottom of the column listing and type to add a new column.  Below I’ve added a new “UrlLink” column of type “nvarchar” (since our property is a string): When we click ok our database will be updated to have the new column and our schema will now match our model classes. Because we are manually modifying our database schema, there is one additional step we need to take to let EF Code-First know that the database schema is in sync with our model classes.  As i mentioned earlier, when a database is automatically created by EF Code-First it adds a “EdmMetadata” table to the database to track schema versions (and hash our model classes against them to detect mismatches between our model classes and the database schema): Since we are manually updating and maintaining our database schema, we don’t need this table – and can just delete it: This will leave us with just the two tables that correspond to our model classes: And now when we re-run our /Dinners/Upcoming URL it will display the dinners correctly: One last touch we could do would be to update our view to check for the new UrlLink property and render a <a> link to it if an event has one: And now when we refresh our /Dinners/Upcoming we will see hyperlinks for the events that have a UrlLink stored in the database: Summary SQL CE provides a free, embedded, database engine that you can use to easily enable database storage.  With SQL CE 4 you can now take advantage of it within ASP.NET projects and applications (both Web Forms and MVC). VS 2010 SP1 provides tooling support that enables you to easily create, edit and modify SQL CE databases – as well as use the standard EF designer against them.  This allows you to re-use your existing skills and data knowledge while taking advantage of an embedded database option.  This is useful both for small applications (where you don’t need the scalability of a full SQL Server), as well as for development and testing scenarios – where you want to be able to rapidly develop/test your application without having a full database instance.  SQL CE makes it easy to later migrate your data to a full SQL Server or SQL Azure instance if you want to – without having to change any code in your application.  All we would need to change in the above two scenarios is the <connectionString> value within the web.config file in order to have our code run against a full SQL Server.  This provides the flexibility to scale up your application starting from a small embedded database solution as needed. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

  Read the article

• actionscript3: reflect-class applied on rotationY

  - by algro

  Hi, I'm using a class which applies a visual reflection-effect to defined movieclips. I use a reflection-class from here: link to source. It works like a charm except when I apply a rotation to the movieclip. In my case the reflection is still visible but only a part of it. What am I doing wrong? How could I pass/include the rotation to the Reflection-Class ? Thanks in advance! This is how you apply the Reflection Class to your movieclip: var ref_mc:MovieClip = new MoviClip(); addChild(ref_mc); var r1:Reflect = new Reflect({mc:ref_mc, alpha:50, ratio:50,distance:0, updateTime:0,reflectionDropoff:1}); Now I apply a rotation to my movieclip: ref_mc.rotationY = 30; And Here the Reflect-Class: package com.pixelfumes.reflect{ import flash.display.MovieClip; import flash.display.DisplayObject; import flash.display.BitmapData; import flash.display.Bitmap; import flash.geom.Matrix; import flash.display.GradientType; import flash.display.SpreadMethod; import flash.utils.setInterval; import flash.utils.clearInterval; public class Reflect extends MovieClip{ //Created By Ben Pritchard of Pixelfumes 2007 //Thanks to Mim, Jasper, Jason Merrill and all the others who //have contributed to the improvement of this class //static var for the version of this class private static var VERSION:String = "4.0"; //reference to the movie clip we are reflecting private var mc:MovieClip; //the BitmapData object that will hold a visual copy of the mc private var mcBMP:BitmapData; //the BitmapData object that will hold the reflected image private var reflectionBMP:Bitmap; //the clip that will act as out gradient mask private var gradientMask_mc:MovieClip; //how often the reflection should update (if it is video or animated) private var updateInt:Number; //the size the reflection is allowed to reflect within private var bounds:Object; //the distance the reflection is vertically from the mc private var distance:Number = 0; function Reflect(args:Object){ /*the args object passes in the following variables /we set the values of our internal vars to math the args*/ //the clip being reflected mc = args.mc; //the alpha level of the reflection clip var alpha:Number = args.alpha/100; //the ratio opaque color used in the gradient mask var ratio:Number = args.ratio; //update time interval var updateTime:Number = args.updateTime; //the distance at which the reflection visually drops off at var reflectionDropoff:Number = args.reflectionDropoff; //the distance the reflection starts from the bottom of the mc var distance:Number = args.distance; //store width and height of the clip var mcHeight = mc.height; var mcWidth = mc.width; //store the bounds of the reflection bounds = new Object(); bounds.width = mcWidth; bounds.height = mcHeight; //create the BitmapData that will hold a snapshot of the movie clip mcBMP = new BitmapData(bounds.width, bounds.height, true, 0xFFFFFF); mcBMP.draw(mc); //create the BitmapData the will hold the reflection reflectionBMP = new Bitmap(mcBMP); //flip the reflection upside down reflectionBMP.scaleY = -1; //move the reflection to the bottom of the movie clip reflectionBMP.y = (bounds.height*2) + distance; //add the reflection to the movie clip's Display Stack var reflectionBMPRef:DisplayObject = mc.addChild(reflectionBMP); reflectionBMPRef.name = "reflectionBMP"; //add a blank movie clip to hold our gradient mask var gradientMaskRef:DisplayObject = mc.addChild(new MovieClip()); gradientMaskRef.name = "gradientMask_mc"; //get a reference to the movie clip - cast the DisplayObject that is returned as a MovieClip gradientMask_mc = mc.getChildByName("gradientMask_mc") as MovieClip; //set the values for the gradient fill var fillType:String = GradientType.LINEAR; var colors:Array = [0xFFFFFF, 0xFFFFFF]; var alphas:Array = [alpha, 0]; var ratios:Array = [0, ratio]; var spreadMethod:String = SpreadMethod.PAD; //create the Matrix and create the gradient box var matr:Matrix = new Matrix(); //set the height of the Matrix used for the gradient mask var matrixHeight:Number; if (reflectionDropoff<=0) { matrixHeight = bounds.height; } else { matrixHeight = bounds.height/reflectionDropoff; } matr.createGradientBox(bounds.width, matrixHeight, (90/180)*Math.PI, 0, 0); //create the gradient fill gradientMask_mc.graphics.beginGradientFill(fillType, colors, alphas, ratios, matr, spreadMethod); gradientMask_mc.graphics.drawRect(0,0,bounds.width,bounds.height); //position the mask over the reflection clip gradientMask_mc.y = mc.getChildByName("reflectionBMP").y - mc.getChildByName("reflectionBMP").height; //cache clip as a bitmap so that the gradient mask will function gradientMask_mc.cacheAsBitmap = true; mc.getChildByName("reflectionBMP").cacheAsBitmap = true; //set the mask for the reflection as the gradient mask mc.getChildByName("reflectionBMP").mask = gradientMask_mc; //if we are updating the reflection for a video or animation do so here if(updateTime > -1){ updateInt = setInterval(update, updateTime, mc); } } public function setBounds(w:Number,h:Number):void{ //allows the user to set the area that the reflection is allowed //this is useful for clips that move within themselves bounds.width = w; bounds.height = h; gradientMask_mc.width = bounds.width; redrawBMP(mc); } public function redrawBMP(mc:MovieClip):void { // redraws the bitmap reflection - Mim Gamiet [2006] mcBMP.dispose(); mcBMP = new BitmapData(bounds.width, bounds.height, true, 0xFFFFFF); mcBMP.draw(mc); } private function update(mc):void { //updates the reflection to visually match the movie clip mcBMP = new BitmapData(bounds.width, bounds.height, true, 0xFFFFFF); mcBMP.draw(mc); reflectionBMP.bitmapData = mcBMP; } public function destroy():void{ //provides a method to remove the reflection mc.removeChild(mc.getChildByName("reflectionBMP")); reflectionBMP = null; mcBMP.dispose(); clearInterval(updateInt); mc.removeChild(mc.getChildByName("gradientMask_mc")); } } }

  Read the article

• Set postion in customized list field in blackberry

  - by arunabha

  I want three list field items to be displayed, from bottom to top. I am able to display three list field items, but they display from top to bottom. I have tried setting the position, but it isn't working. import java.util.Vector; import net.rim.device.api.system.Bitmap; import net.rim.device.api.system.Display; import net.rim.device.api.ui.ContextMenu; import net.rim.device.api.ui.DrawStyle; import net.rim.device.api.ui.Field; import net.rim.device.api.ui.Font; import net.rim.device.api.ui.Graphics; import net.rim.device.api.ui.Manager; import net.rim.device.api.ui.MenuItem; import net.rim.device.api.ui.UiApplication; import net.rim.device.api.ui.component.BitmapField; import net.rim.device.api.ui.component.Dialog; import net.rim.device.api.ui.component.LabelField; import net.rim.device.api.ui.component.ListField; import net.rim.device.api.ui.component.ListFieldCallback; import net.rim.device.api.ui.component.NullField; import net.rim.device.api.ui.container.FullScreen; import net.rim.device.api.ui.container.MainScreen; import net.rim.device.api.util.Arrays; import net.rim.device.api.ui.component.ListField; /** * @author Jason Emerick */ public class TaskListField extends UiApplication { //statics ------------------------------------------------------------------ public static void main(String[] args) { TaskListField theApp = new TaskListField(); theApp.enterEventDispatcher(); } public TaskListField() { pushScreen(new TaskList()); } } /*class List extends FullScreen { TaskList tl; List(){ super(); TaskList tl=new TaskList(); } }*/ class TaskList extends MainScreen implements ListFieldCallback { private Vector rows; private Bitmap p1; private Bitmap p2; private Bitmap p3; String Task; ListField listnew=new ListField(); public TaskList() { super(); listnew.setRowHeight(50); //setEmptyString("Hooray, no tasks here!", DrawStyle.HCENTER); listnew.setCallback(this); p1 = Bitmap.getBitmapResource("1.png"); p2 = Bitmap.getBitmapResource("2.png"); p3 = Bitmap.getBitmapResource("3.png"); rows = new Vector(); for (int x = 0; x < 3; x++) { TableRowManager row = new TableRowManager(); if (x== 0) { Task="On Air Now"; } if (x== 1) { Task="Music Channel"; } if (x==2) { Task="News Channel"; } // SET THE PRIORITY BITMAP FIELD // if high priority, display p1 bitmap if (x % 2 == 0) { row.add(new BitmapField(p1)); } // if priority is 2, set p2 bitmap else if (x % 3 == 0) { row.add(new BitmapField(p2)); } // if priority is 3, set p3 bitmap else { row.add(new BitmapField(p3)); } // SET THE TASK NAME LABELFIELD // if overdue, bold/underline LabelField task = new LabelField(Task, DrawStyle.ELLIPSIS); // if due today, bold if (x % 2 == 0) { task.setFont(Font.getDefault().derive( Font.BOLD)); } else { task.setFont(Font.getDefault().derive(Font.BOLD)); } row.add(task); LabelField task1 = new LabelField("Now Playing" + String.valueOf(x), DrawStyle.ELLIPSIS); // if due today, bold /* if (x % 2 == 0) { task.setFont(Font.getDefault().derive( Font.BOLD)); } else { task.setFont(Font.getDefault().derive(Font.BOLD)); }*/ Font myFont = Font.getDefault().derive(Font.PLAIN, 12); task1.setFont(myFont); row.add(task1); // SET THE DUE DATE/TIME row.add(new LabelField("", DrawStyle.ELLIPSIS | LabelField.USE_ALL_WIDTH | DrawStyle.RIGHT) { protected void paint(Graphics graphics) { graphics.setColor(0x00878787); super.paint(graphics); } }); rows.addElement(row); } listnew.setSize(rows.size()); this.add(listnew); } // ListFieldCallback Implementation public void drawListRow(ListField listField, Graphics g, int index, int y, int width) { //TaskList list =(TaskListField) listnew; TableRowManager rowManager = (TableRowManager)rows .elementAt(index); rowManager.drawRow(g, 0, y, width, listnew.getRowHeight()); } private class TableRowManager extends Manager { public TableRowManager() { super(0); } // Causes the fields within this row manager to be layed out then // painted. public void drawRow(Graphics g, int x, int y, int width, int height) { // Arrange the cell fields within this row manager. layout(0, 1); // Place this row manager within its enclosing list. setPosition(x,y); // Apply a translating/clipping transformation to the graphics // context so that this row paints in the right area. g.pushRegion(getExtent()); // Paint this manager's controlled fields. subpaint(g); g.setColor(0x00CACACA); g.drawLine(0, 0, getPreferredWidth(), 0); // Restore the graphics context. g.popContext(); } // Arrages this manager's controlled fields from left to right within // the enclosing table's columns. protected void sublayout(int width, int height) { // set the size and position of each field. int fontHeight = Font.getDefault().getHeight(); int preferredWidth = getPreferredWidth(); // start with the Bitmap Field of the priority icon /* Field field = getField(0); layoutChild(field, 0, 0); setPositionChild(field, 150, 300);*/ // set the task name label field /* field = getField(1); layoutChild(field, preferredWidth - 16, fontHeight + 1); setPositionChild(field, 34, 3); // set the list name label field field = getField(2); layoutChild(field, 150, fontHeight + 1); setPositionChild(field, 34, fontHeight + 6);*/ // set the due time name label field /* field = getField(3); layoutChild(field, 150, fontHeight + 1); setPositionChild(field,4,340);*/ /* layoutChild(listnew, preferredWidth, fontHeight); setPositionChild(listnew, 3, 396);*/ setExtent(360, 480); } // The preferred width of a row is defined by the list renderer. public int getPreferredWidth() { return getWidth(); } // The preferred height of a row is the "row height" as defined in the // enclosing list. public int getPreferredHeight() { return listnew.getRowHeight(); } } public Object get(ListField listField, int index) { // TODO Auto-generated method stub return null; } public int getPreferredWidth(ListField listField) { // TODO Auto-generated method stub return 0; } public int indexOfList(ListField listField, String prefix, int start) { // TODO Auto-generated method stub return 0; } }

  Read the article

• Uploading multiple files using Spring MVC 3.0.2 after HiddenHttpMethodFilter has been enabled

  - by Tiny

  I'm using Spring version 3.0.2. I need to upload multiple files using the multiple="multiple" attribute of a file browser such as, <input type="file" id="myFile" name="myFile" multiple="multiple"/> (and not using multiple file browsers something like the one stated by this answer, it indeed works I tried). Although no versions of Internet Explorer supports this approach unless an appropriate jQuery plugin/widget is used, I don't care about it right now (since most other browsers support this). This works fine with commons fileupload but in addition to using RequestMethod.POST and RequestMethod.GET methods, I also want to use other request methods supported and suggested by Spring like RequestMethod.PUT and RequestMethod.DELETE in their own appropriate places. For this to be so, I have configured Spring with HiddenHttpMethodFilter which goes fine as this question indicates. but it can upload only one file at a time even though multiple files in the file browser are chosen. In the Spring controller class, a method is mapped as follows. @RequestMapping(method={RequestMethod.POST}, value={"admin_side/Temp"}) public String onSubmit(@RequestParam("myFile") List<MultipartFile> files, @ModelAttribute("tempBean") TempBean tempBean, BindingResult error, Map model, HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) throws IOException, FileUploadException { for(MultipartFile file:files) { System.out.println(file.getOriginalFilename()); } } Even with the request parameter @RequestParam("myFile") List<MultipartFile> files which is a List of type MultipartFile (it can always have only one file at a time). I could find a strategy which is likely to work with multiple files on this blog. I have gone through it carefully. The solution below the section SOLUTION 2 – USE THE RAW REQUEST says, If however the client insists on using the same form input name such as ‘files[]‘ or ‘files’ and then populating that name with multiple files then a small hack is necessary as follows. As noted above Spring 2.5 throws an exception if it detects the same form input name of type file more than once. CommonsFileUploadSupport – the class which throws that exception is not final and the method which throws that exception is protected so using the wonders of inheritance and subclassing one can simply fix/modify the logic a little bit as follows. The change I’ve made is literally one word representing one method invocation which enables us to have multiple files incoming under the same form input name. It attempts to override the method protected MultipartParsingResult parseFileItems(List fileItems, String encoding) {} of the abstract class CommonsFileUploadSupport by extending the class CommonsMultipartResolver such as, package multipartResolver; import java.io.UnsupportedEncodingException; import java.util.HashMap; import java.util.Iterator; import java.util.List; import java.util.Map; import javax.servlet.ServletContext; import org.apache.commons.fileupload.FileItem; import org.springframework.util.StringUtils; import org.springframework.web.multipart.MultipartException; import org.springframework.web.multipart.MultipartFile; import org.springframework.web.multipart.commons.CommonsMultipartFile; import org.springframework.web.multipart.commons.CommonsMultipartResolver; final public class MultiCommonsMultipartResolver extends CommonsMultipartResolver { public MultiCommonsMultipartResolver() { } public MultiCommonsMultipartResolver(ServletContext servletContext) { super(servletContext); } @Override @SuppressWarnings("unchecked") protected MultipartParsingResult parseFileItems(List fileItems, String encoding) { Map<String, MultipartFile> multipartFiles = new HashMap<String, MultipartFile>(); Map multipartParameters = new HashMap(); // Extract multipart files and multipart parameters. for (Iterator it = fileItems.iterator(); it.hasNext();) { FileItem fileItem = (FileItem) it.next(); if (fileItem.isFormField()) { String value = null; if (encoding != null) { try { value = fileItem.getString(encoding); } catch (UnsupportedEncodingException ex) { if (logger.isWarnEnabled()) { logger.warn("Could not decode multipart item '" + fileItem.getFieldName() + "' with encoding '" + encoding + "': using platform default"); } value = fileItem.getString(); } } else { value = fileItem.getString(); } String[] curParam = (String[]) multipartParameters.get(fileItem.getFieldName()); if (curParam == null) { // simple form field multipartParameters.put(fileItem.getFieldName(), new String[] { value }); } else { // array of simple form fields String[] newParam = StringUtils.addStringToArray(curParam, value); multipartParameters.put(fileItem.getFieldName(), newParam); } } else { // multipart file field CommonsMultipartFile file = new CommonsMultipartFile(fileItem); if (multipartFiles.put(fileItem.getName(), file) != null) { throw new MultipartException("Multiple files for field name [" + file.getName() + "] found - not supported by MultipartResolver"); } if (logger.isDebugEnabled()) { logger.debug("Found multipart file [" + file.getName() + "] of size " + file.getSize() + " bytes with original filename [" + file.getOriginalFilename() + "], stored " + file.getStorageDescription()); } } } return new MultipartParsingResult(multipartFiles, multipartParameters); } } What happens is that the last line in the method parseFileItems() (the return statement) i.e. return new MultipartParsingResult(multipartFiles, multipartParameters); causes a compile-time error because the first parameter multipartFiles is a type of Map implemented by HashMap but in reality, it requires a parameter of type MultiValueMap<String, MultipartFile> It is a constructor of a static class inside the abstract class CommonsFileUploadSupport, public abstract class CommonsFileUploadSupport { protected static class MultipartParsingResult { public MultipartParsingResult(MultiValueMap<String, MultipartFile> mpFiles, Map<String, String[]> mpParams) { } } } The reason might be - this solution is about the Spring version 2.5 and I'm using the Spring version 3.0.2 which might be inappropriate for this version. I however tried to replace the Map with MultiValueMap in various ways such as the one shown in the following segment of code, MultiValueMap<String, MultipartFile>mul=new LinkedMultiValueMap<String, MultipartFile>(); for(Entry<String, MultipartFile>entry:multipartFiles.entrySet()) { mul.add(entry.getKey(), entry.getValue()); } return new MultipartParsingResult(mul, multipartParameters); but no success. I'm not sure how to replace Map with MultiValueMap and even doing so could work either. After doing this, the browser shows the Http response, HTTP Status 400 - type Status report message description The request sent by the client was syntactically incorrect (). Apache Tomcat/6.0.26 I have tried to shorten the question as possible as I could and I haven't included unnecessary code. How could be made it possible to upload multiple files after Spring has been configured with HiddenHttpMethodFilter? That blog indicates that It is a long standing, high priority bug. If there is no solution regarding the version 3.0.2 (3 or higher) then I have to disable Spring support forever and continue to use commons-fileupolad as suggested by the third solution on that blog omitting the PUT, DELETE and other request methods forever. Just curiously waiting for a solution and/or suggestion. Very little changes to the code in the parseFileItems() method inside the class MultiCommonsMultipartResolver might make it to upload multiple files but I couldn't succeed in my attempts (again with the Spring version 3.0.2 (3 or higher)).

  Read the article

• What&rsquo;s New in ASP.NET 4.0 Part Two: WebForms and Visual Studio Enhancements

  - by Rick Strahl

  In the last installment I talked about the core changes in the ASP.NET runtime that I’ve been taking advantage of. In this column, I’ll cover the changes to the Web Forms engine and some of the cool improvements in Visual Studio that make Web and general development easier. WebForms The WebForms engine is the area that has received most significant changes in ASP.NET 4.0. Probably the most widely anticipated features are related to managing page client ids and of ViewState on WebForm pages. Take Control of Your ClientIDs Unique ClientID generation in ASP.NET has been one of the most complained about “features” in ASP.NET. Although there’s a very good technical reason for these unique generated ids - they guarantee unique ids for each and every server control on a page - these unique and generated ids often get in the way of client-side JavaScript development and CSS styling as it’s often inconvenient and fragile to work with the long, generated ClientIDs. In ASP.NET 4.0 you can now specify an explicit client id mode on each control or each naming container parent control to control how client ids are generated. By default, ASP.NET generates mangled client ids for any control contained in a naming container (like a Master Page, or a User Control for example). The key to ClientID management in ASP.NET 4.0 are the new ClientIDMode and ClientIDRowSuffix properties. ClientIDMode supports four different ClientID generation settings shown below. For the following examples, imagine that you have a Textbox control named txtName inside of a master page control container on a WebForms page. <%@Page Language="C#"      MasterPageFile="~/Site.Master"     CodeBehind="WebForm2.aspx.cs"     Inherits="WebApplication1.WebForm2"  %> <asp:Content ID="content"  ContentPlaceHolderID="content"               runat="server"               ClientIDMode="Static" >       <asp:TextBox runat="server" ID="txtName" /> </asp:Content> The four available ClientIDMode values are: AutoID This is the existing behavior in ASP.NET 1.x-3.x where full naming container munging takes place. <input name="ctl00$content$txtName" type="text"        id="ctl00_content_txtName" /> This should be familiar to any ASP.NET developer and results in fairly unpredictable client ids that can easily change if the containership hierarchy changes. For example, removing the master page changes the name in this case, so if you were to move a block of script code that works against the control to a non-Master page, the script code immediately breaks. Static This option is the most deterministic setting that forces the control’s ClientID to use its ID value directly. No naming container naming at all is applied and you end up with clean client ids: <input name="ctl00$content$txtName"         type="text" id="txtName" /> Note that the name property which is used for postback variables to the server still is munged, but the ClientID property is displayed simply as the ID value that you have assigned to the control. This option is what most of us want to use, but you have to be clear on that because it can potentially cause conflicts with other controls on the page. If there are several instances of the same naming container (several instances of the same user control for example) there can easily be a client id naming conflict. Note that if you assign Static to a data-bound control, like a list child control in templates, you do not get unique ids either, so for list controls where you rely on unique id for child controls, you’ll probably want to use Predictable rather than Static. I’ll write more on this a little later when I discuss ClientIDRowSuffix. Predictable The previous two values are pretty self-explanatory. Predictable however, requires some explanation. To me at least it’s not in the least bit predictable. MSDN defines this value as follows: This algorithm is used for controls that are in data-bound controls. The ClientID value is generated by concatenating the ClientID value of the parent naming container with the ID value of the control. If the control is a data-bound control that generates multiple rows, the value of the data field specified in the ClientIDRowSuffix property is added at the end. For the GridView control, multiple data fields can be specified. If the ClientIDRowSuffix property is blank, a sequential number is added at the end instead of a data-field value. Each segment is separated by an underscore character (_). The key that makes this value a bit confusing is that it relies on the parent NamingContainer’s ClientID to build its own ClientID value. This effectively means that the value is not predictable at all but rather very tightly coupled to the parent naming container’s ClientIDMode setting. For my simple textbox example, if the ClientIDMode property of the parent naming container (Page in this case) is set to “Predictable” you’ll get this: <input name="ctl00$content$txtName" type="text"         id="content_txtName" /> which gives an id that based on walking up to the currently active naming container (the MasterPage content container) and starting the id formatting from there downward. Think of this as a semi unique name that’s guaranteed unique only for the naming container. If, on the other hand, the Page is set to “AutoID” you get the following with Predictable on txtName: <input name="ctl00$content$txtName" type="text"         id="ctl00_content_txtName" /> The latter is effectively the same as if you specified AutoID because it inherits the AutoID naming from the Page and Content Master Page control of the page. But again - predictable behavior always depends on the parent naming container and how it generates its id, so the id may not always be exactly the same as the AutoID generated value because somewhere in the NamingContainer chain the ClientIDMode setting may be set to a different value. For example, if you had another naming container in the middle that was set to Static you’d end up effectively with an id that starts with the NamingContainers id rather than the whole ctl000_content munging. The most common use for Predictable is likely to be for data-bound controls, which results in each data bound item getting a unique ClientID. Unfortunately, even here the behavior can be very unpredictable depending on which data-bound control you use - I found significant differences in how template controls in a GridView behave from those that are used in a ListView control. For example, GridView creates clean child ClientIDs, while ListView still has a naming container in the ClientID, presumably because of the template container on which you can’t set ClientIDMode. Predictable is useful, but only if all naming containers down the chain use this setting. Otherwise you’re right back to the munged ids that are pretty unpredictable. Another property, ClientIDRowSuffix, can be used in combination with ClientIDMode of Predictable to force a suffix onto list client controls. For example: <asp:GridView runat="server" ID="gvItems"              AutoGenerateColumns="false"             ClientIDMode="Static"              ClientIDRowSuffix="Id">     <Columns>     <asp:TemplateField>         <ItemTemplate>             <asp:Label runat="server" id="txtName"                        Text='<%# Eval("Name") %>'                   ClientIDMode="Predictable"/>         </ItemTemplate>     </asp:TemplateField>     <asp:TemplateField>         <ItemTemplate>         <asp:Label runat="server" id="txtId"                     Text='<%# Eval("Id") %>'                     ClientIDMode="Predictable" />         </ItemTemplate>     </asp:TemplateField>     </Columns>  </asp:GridView> generates client Ids inside of a column in the master page described earlier: <td>     <span id="txtName_0">Rick</span> </td> where the value after the underscore is the ClientIDRowSuffix field - in this case “Id” of the item data bound to the control. Note that all of the child controls require ClientIDMode=”Predictable” in order for the ClientIDRowSuffix to be applied, and the parent GridView controls need to be set to Static either explicitly or via Naming Container inheritance to give these simple names. It’s a bummer that ClientIDRowSuffix doesn’t work with Static to produce this automatically. Another real problem is that other controls process the ClientIDMode differently. For example, a ListView control processes the Predictable ClientIDMode differently and produces the following with the Static ListView and Predictable child controls: <span id="ctrl0_txtName_0">Rick</span> I couldn’t even figure out a way using ClientIDMode to get a simple ID that also uses a suffix short of falling back to manually generated ids using <%= %> expressions instead. Given the inconsistencies inside of list controls using <%= %>, ids for the ListView might not be a bad idea anyway. Inherit The final setting is Inherit, which is the default for all controls except Page. This means that controls by default inherit the parent naming container’s ClientIDMode setting. For more detailed information on ClientID behavior and different scenarios you can check out a blog post of mine on this subject: http://www.west-wind.com/weblog/posts/54760.aspx. ClientID Enhancements Summary The ClientIDMode property is a welcome addition to ASP.NET 4.0. To me this is probably the most useful WebForms feature as it allows me to generate clean IDs simply by setting ClientIDMode="Static" on either the page or inside of Web.config (in the Pages section) which applies the setting down to the entire page which is my 95% scenario. For the few cases when it matters - for list controls and inside of multi-use user controls or custom server controls) - I can use Predictable or even AutoID to force controls to unique names. For application-level page development, this is easy to accomplish and provides maximum usability for working with client script code against page controls. ViewStateMode Another area of large criticism for WebForms is ViewState. ViewState is used internally by ASP.NET to persist page-level changes to non-postback properties on controls as pages post back to the server. It’s a useful mechanism that works great for the overall mechanics of WebForms, but it can also cause all sorts of overhead for page operation as ViewState can very quickly get out of control and consume huge amounts of bandwidth in your page content. ViewState can also wreak havoc with client-side scripting applications that modify control properties that are tracked by ViewState, which can produce very unpredictable results on a Postback after client-side updates. Over the years in my own development, I’ve often turned off ViewState on pages to reduce overhead. Yes, you lose some functionality, but you can easily implement most of the common functionality in non-ViewState workarounds. Relying less on heavy ViewState controls and sticking with simpler controls or raw HTML constructs avoids getting around ViewState problems. In ASP.NET 3.x and prior, it wasn’t easy to control ViewState - you could turn it on or off and if you turned it off at the page or web.config level, you couldn’t turn it back on for specific controls. In short, it was an all or nothing approach. With ASP.NET 4.0, the new ViewStateMode property gives you more control. It allows you to disable ViewState globally either on the page or web.config level and then turn it back on for specific controls that might need it. ViewStateMode only works when EnableViewState="true" on the page or web.config level (which is the default). You can then use ViewStateMode of Disabled, Enabled or Inherit to control the ViewState settings on the page. If you’re shooting for minimal ViewState usage, the ideal situation is to set ViewStateMode to disabled on the Page or web.config level and only turn it back on particular controls: <%@Page Language="C#"      CodeBehind="WebForm2.aspx.cs"     Inherits="Westwind.WebStore.WebForm2"        ClientIDMode="Static"                ViewStateMode="Disabled"     EnableViewState="true"  %> <!-- this control has viewstate  --> <asp:TextBox runat="server" ID="txtName"  ViewStateMode="Enabled" />       <!-- this control has no viewstate - it inherits  from parent container --> <asp:TextBox runat="server" ID="txtAddress" /> Note that the EnableViewState="true" at the Page level isn’t required since it’s the default, but it’s important that the value is true. ViewStateMode has no effect if EnableViewState="false" at the page level. The main benefit of ViewStateMode is that it allows you to more easily turn off ViewState for most of the page and enable only a few key controls that might need it. For me personally, this is a perfect combination as most of my WebForm apps can get away without any ViewState at all. But some controls - especially third party controls - often don’t work well without ViewState enabled, and now it’s much easier to selectively enable controls rather than the old way, which required you to pretty much turn off ViewState for all controls that you didn’t want ViewState on. Inline HTML Encoding HTML encoding is an important feature to prevent cross-site scripting attacks in data entered by users on your site. In order to make it easier to create HTML encoded content, ASP.NET 4.0 introduces a new Expression syntax using <%: %> to encode string values. The encoding expression syntax looks like this: <%: "<script type='text/javascript'>" +     "alert('Really?');</script>" %> which produces properly encoded HTML: &lt;script type=&#39;text/javascript&#39; &gt;alert(&#39;Really?&#39;);&lt;/script&gt; Effectively this is a shortcut to: <%= HttpUtility.HtmlEncode( "<script type='text/javascript'>" + "alert('Really?');</script>") %> Of course the <%: %> syntax can also evaluate expressions just like <%= %> so the more common scenario applies this expression syntax against data your application is displaying. Here’s an example displaying some data model values: <%: Model.Address.Street %> This snippet shows displaying data from your application’s data store or more importantly, from data entered by users. Anything that makes it easier and less verbose to HtmlEncode text is a welcome addition to avoid potential cross-site scripting attacks. Although I listed Inline HTML Encoding here under WebForms, anything that uses the WebForms rendering engine including ASP.NET MVC, benefits from this feature. ScriptManager Enhancements The ASP.NET ScriptManager control in the past has introduced some nice ways to take programmatic and markup control over script loading, but there were a number of shortcomings in this control. The ASP.NET 4.0 ScriptManager has a number of improvements that make it easier to control script loading and addresses a few of the shortcomings that have often kept me from using the control in favor of manual script loading. The first is the AjaxFrameworkMode property which finally lets you suppress loading the ASP.NET AJAX runtime. Disabled doesn’t load any ASP.NET AJAX libraries, but there’s also an Explicit mode that lets you pick and choose the library pieces individually and reduce the footprint of ASP.NET AJAX script included if you are using the library. There’s also a new EnableCdn property that forces any script that has a new WebResource attribute CdnPath property set to a CDN supplied URL. If the script has this Attribute property set to a non-null/empty value and EnableCdn is enabled on the ScriptManager, that script will be served from the specified CdnPath. [assembly: WebResource(    "Westwind.Web.Resources.ww.jquery.js",    "application/x-javascript",    CdnPath =  "http://mysite.com/scripts/ww.jquery.min.js")] Cool, but a little too static for my taste since this value can’t be changed at runtime to point at a debug script as needed, for example. Assembly names for loading scripts from resources can now be simple names rather than fully qualified assembly names, which make it less verbose to reference scripts from assemblies loaded from your bin folder or the assembly reference area in web.config: <asp:ScriptManager runat="server" id="Id"          EnableCdn="true"         AjaxFrameworkMode="disabled">     <Scripts>         <asp:ScriptReference          Name="Westwind.Web.Resources.ww.jquery.js"         Assembly="Westwind.Web" />     </Scripts>        </asp:ScriptManager> The ScriptManager in 4.0 also supports script combining via the CompositeScript tag, which allows you to very easily combine scripts into a single script resource served via ASP.NET. Even nicer: You can specify the URL that the combined script is served with. Check out the following script manager markup that combines several static file scripts and a script resource into a single ASP.NET served resource from a static URL (allscripts.js): <asp:ScriptManager runat="server" id="Id"          EnableCdn="true"         AjaxFrameworkMode="disabled">     <CompositeScript          Path="~/scripts/allscripts.js">         <Scripts>             <asp:ScriptReference                    Path="~/scripts/jquery.js" />             <asp:ScriptReference                    Path="~/scripts/ww.jquery.js" />             <asp:ScriptReference            Name="Westwind.Web.Resources.editors.js"                 Assembly="Westwind.Web" />         </Scripts>     </CompositeScript> </asp:ScriptManager> When you render this into HTML, you’ll see a single script reference in the page: <script src="scripts/allscripts.debug.js"          type="text/javascript"></script> All you need to do to make this work is ensure that allscripts.js and allscripts.debug.js exist in the scripts folder of your application - they can be empty but the file has to be there. This is pretty cool, but you want to be real careful that you use unique URLs for each combination of scripts you combine or else browser and server caching will easily screw you up royally. The script manager also allows you to override native ASP.NET AJAX scripts now as any script references defined in the Scripts section of the ScriptManager trump internal references. So if you want custom behavior or you want to fix a possible bug in the core libraries that normally are loaded from resources, you can now do this simply by referencing the script resource name in the Name property and pointing at System.Web for the assembly. Not a common scenario, but when you need it, it can come in real handy. Still, there are a number of shortcomings in this control. For one, the ScriptManager and ClientScript APIs still have no common entry point so control developers are still faced with having to check and support both APIs to load scripts so that controls can work on pages that do or don’t have a ScriptManager on the page. The CdnUrl is static and compiled in, which is very restrictive. And finally, there’s still no control over where scripts get loaded on the page - ScriptManager still injects scripts into the middle of the HTML markup rather than in the header or optionally the footer. This, in turn, means there is little control over script loading order, which can be problematic for control developers. MetaDescription, MetaKeywords Page Properties There are also a number of additional Page properties that correspond to some of the other features discussed in this column: ClientIDMode, ClientTarget and ViewStateMode. Another minor but useful feature is that you can now directly access the MetaDescription and MetaKeywords properties on the Page object to set the corresponding meta tags programmatically. Updating these values programmatically previously required either <%= %> expressions in the page markup or dynamic insertion of literal controls into the page. You can now just set these properties programmatically on the Page object in any Control derived class on the page or the Page itself: Page.MetaKeywords = "ASP.NET,4.0,New Features"; Page.MetaDescription = "This article discusses the new features in ASP.NET 4.0"; Note, that there’s no corresponding ASP.NET tag for the HTML Meta element, so the only way to specify these values in markup and access them is via the @Page tag: <%@Page Language="C#"      CodeBehind="WebForm2.aspx.cs"     Inherits="Westwind.WebStore.WebForm2"      ClientIDMode="Static"                MetaDescription="Article that discusses what's                      new in ASP.NET 4.0"     MetaKeywords="ASP.NET,4.0,New Features" %> Nothing earth shattering but quite convenient. Visual Studio 2010 Enhancements for Web Development For Web development there are also a host of editor enhancements in Visual Studio 2010. Some of these are not Web specific but they are useful for Web developers in general. Text Editors Throughout Visual Studio 2010, the text editors have all been updated to a new core engine based on WPF which provides some interesting new features for various code editors including the nice ability to zoom in and out with Ctrl-MouseWheel to quickly change the size of text. There are many more API options to control the editor and although Visual Studio 2010 doesn’t yet use many of these features, we can look forward to enhancements in add-ins and future editor updates from the various language teams that take advantage of the visual richness that WPF provides to editing. On the negative side, I’ve noticed that occasionally the code editor and especially the HTML and JavaScript editors will lose the ability to use various navigation keys like arrows, back and delete keys, which requires closing and reopening the documents at times. This issue seems to be well documented so I suspect this will be addressed soon with a hotfix or within the first service pack. Overall though, the code editors work very well, especially given that they were re-written completely using WPF, which was one of my big worries when I first heard about the complete redesign of the editors. Multi-Targeting Visual Studio now targets all versions of the .NET framework from 2.0 forward. You can use Visual Studio 2010 to work on your ASP.NET 2, 3.0 and 3.5 applications which is a nice way to get your feet wet with the new development environment without having to make changes to existing applications. It’s nice to have one tool to work in for all the different versions. Multi-Monitor Support One cool feature of Visual Studio 2010 is the ability to drag windows out of the Visual Studio environment and out onto the desktop including onto another monitor easily. Since Web development often involves working with a host of designers at the same time - visual designer, HTML markup window, code behind and JavaScript editor - it’s really nice to be able to have a little more screen real estate to work on each of these editors. Microsoft made a welcome change in the environment. IntelliSense Snippets for HTML and JavaScript Editors The HTML and JavaScript editors now finally support IntelliSense scripts to create macro-based template expansions that have been in the core C# and Visual Basic code editors since Visual Studio 2005. Snippets allow you to create short XML-based template definitions that can act as static macros or real templates that can have replaceable values that can be embedded into the expanded text. The XML syntax for these snippets is straight forward and it’s pretty easy to create custom snippets manually. You can easily create snippets using XML and store them in your custom snippets folder (C:\Users\rstrahl\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Code Snippets\Visual Web Developer\My HTML Snippets and My JScript Snippets), but it helps to use one of the third-party tools that exist to simplify the process for you. I use SnippetEditor, by Bill McCarthy, which makes short work of creating snippets interactively (http://snippeteditor.codeplex.com/). Note: You may have to manually add the Visual Studio 2010 User specific Snippet folders to this tool to see existing ones you’ve created. Code snippets are some of the biggest time savers and HTML editing more than anything deals with lots of repetitive tasks that lend themselves to text expansion. Visual Studio 2010 includes a slew of built-in snippets (that you can also customize!) and you can create your own very easily. If you haven’t done so already, I encourage you to spend a little time examining your coding patterns and find the repetitive code that you write and convert it into snippets. I’ve been using CodeRush for this for years, but now you can do much of the basic expansion natively for HTML and JavaScript snippets. jQuery Integration Is Now Native jQuery is a popular JavaScript library and recently Microsoft has recently stated that it will become the primary client-side scripting technology to drive higher level script functionality in various ASP.NET Web projects that Microsoft provides. In Visual Studio 2010, the default full project template includes jQuery as part of a new project including the support files that provide IntelliSense (-vsdoc files). IntelliSense support for jQuery is now also baked into Visual Studio 2010, so unlike Visual Studio 2008 which required a separate download, no further installs are required for a rich IntelliSense experience with jQuery. Summary ASP.NET 4.0 brings many useful improvements to the platform, but thankfully most of the changes are incremental changes that don’t compromise backwards compatibility and they allow developers to ease into the new features one feature at a time. None of the changes in ASP.NET 4.0 or Visual Studio 2010 are monumental or game changers. The bigger features are language and .NET Framework changes that are also optional. This ASP.NET and tools release feels more like fine tuning and getting some long-standing kinks worked out of the platform. It shows that the ASP.NET team is dedicated to paying attention to community feedback and responding with changes to the platform and development environment based on this feedback. If you haven’t gotten your feet wet with ASP.NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010, there’s no reason not to give it a shot now - the ASP.NET 4.0 platform is solid and Visual Studio 2010 works very well for a brand new release. Check it out. © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in ASP.NET  

  Read the article

• 256 Windows Azure Worker Roles, Windows Kinect and a 90's Text-Based Ray-Tracer

  - by Alan Smith

  For a couple of years I have been demoing a simple render farm hosted in Windows Azure using worker roles and the Azure Storage service. At the start of the presentation I deploy an Azure application that uses 16 worker roles to render a 1,500 frame 3D ray-traced animation. At the end of the presentation, when the animation was complete, I would play the animation delete the Azure deployment. The standing joke with the audience was that it was that it was a “$2 demo”, as the compute charges for running the 16 instances for an hour was $1.92, factor in the bandwidth charges and it’s a couple of dollars. The point of the demo is that it highlights one of the great benefits of cloud computing, you pay for what you use, and if you need massive compute power for a short period of time using Windows Azure can work out very cost effective. The “$2 demo” was great for presenting at user groups and conferences in that it could be deployed to Azure, used to render an animation, and then removed in a one hour session. I have always had the idea of doing something a bit more impressive with the demo, and scaling it from a “$2 demo” to a “$30 demo”. The challenge was to create a visually appealing animation in high definition format and keep the demo time down to one hour.  This article will take a run through how I achieved this. Ray Tracing Ray tracing, a technique for generating high quality photorealistic images, gained popularity in the 90’s with companies like Pixar creating feature length computer animations, and also the emergence of shareware text-based ray tracers that could run on a home PC. In order to render a ray traced image, the ray of light that would pass from the view point must be tracked until it intersects with an object. At the intersection, the color, reflectiveness, transparency, and refractive index of the object are used to calculate if the ray will be reflected or refracted. Each pixel may require thousands of calculations to determine what color it will be in the rendered image. Pin-Board Toys Having very little artistic talent and a basic understanding of maths I decided to focus on an animation that could be modeled fairly easily and would look visually impressive. I’ve always liked the pin-board desktop toys that become popular in the 80’s and when I was working as a 3D animator back in the 90’s I always had the idea of creating a 3D ray-traced animation of a pin-board, but never found the energy to do it. Even if I had a go at it, the render time to produce an animation that would look respectable on a 486 would have been measured in months. PolyRay Back in 1995 I landed my first real job, after spending three years being a beach-ski-climbing-paragliding-bum, and was employed to create 3D ray-traced animations for a CD-ROM that school kids would use to learn physics. I had got into the strange and wonderful world of text-based ray tracing, and was using a shareware ray-tracer called PolyRay. PolyRay takes a text file describing a scene as input and, after a few hours processing on a 486, produced a high quality ray-traced image. The following is an example of a basic PolyRay scene file. background Midnight_Blue   static define matte surface { ambient 0.1 diffuse 0.7 } define matte_white texture { matte { color white } } define matte_black texture { matte { color dark_slate_gray } } define position_cylindrical 3 define lookup_sawtooth 1 define light_wood <0.6, 0.24, 0.1> define median_wood <0.3, 0.12, 0.03> define dark_wood <0.05, 0.01, 0.005>     define wooden texture { noise surface { ambient 0.2  diffuse 0.7  specular white, 0.5 microfacet Reitz 10 position_fn position_cylindrical position_scale 1  lookup_fn lookup_sawtooth octaves 1 turbulence 1 color_map( [0.0, 0.2, light_wood, light_wood] [0.2, 0.3, light_wood, median_wood] [0.3, 0.4, median_wood, light_wood] [0.4, 0.7, light_wood, light_wood] [0.7, 0.8, light_wood, median_wood] [0.8, 0.9, median_wood, light_wood] [0.9, 1.0, light_wood, dark_wood]) } } define glass texture { surface { ambient 0 diffuse 0 specular 0.2 reflection white, 0.1 transmission white, 1, 1.5 }} define shiny surface { ambient 0.1 diffuse 0.6 specular white, 0.6 microfacet Phong 7  } define steely_blue texture { shiny { color black } } define chrome texture { surface { color white ambient 0.0 diffuse 0.2 specular 0.4 microfacet Phong 10 reflection 0.8 } }   viewpoint {     from <4.000, -1.000, 1.000> at <0.000, 0.000, 0.000> up <0, 1, 0> angle 60     resolution 640, 480 aspect 1.6 image_format 0 }       light <-10, 30, 20> light <-10, 30, -20>   object { disc <0, -2, 0>, <0, 1, 0>, 30 wooden }   object { sphere <0.000, 0.000, 0.000>, 1.00 chrome } object { cylinder <0.000, 0.000, 0.000>, <0.000, 0.000, -4.000>, 0.50 chrome }   After setting up the background and defining colors and textures, the viewpoint is specified. The “camera” is located at a point in 3D space, and it looks towards another point. The angle, image resolution, and aspect ratio are specified. Two lights are present in the image at defined coordinates. The three objects in the image are a wooden disc to represent a table top, and a sphere and cylinder that intersect to form a pin that will be used for the pin board toy in the final animation. When the image is rendered, the following image is produced. The pins are modeled with a chrome surface, so they reflect the environment around them. Note that the scale of the pin shaft is not correct, this will be fixed later. Modeling the Pin Board The frame of the pin-board is made up of three boxes, and six cylinders, the front box is modeled using a clear, slightly reflective solid, with the same refractive index of glass. The other shapes are modeled as metal. object { box <-5.5, -1.5, 1>, <5.5, 5.5, 1.2> glass } object { box <-5.5, -1.5, -0.04>, <5.5, 5.5, -0.09> steely_blue } object { box <-5.5, -1.5, -0.52>, <5.5, 5.5, -0.59> steely_blue } object { cylinder <-5.2, -1.2, 1.4>, <-5.2, -1.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <5.2, -1.2, 1.4>, <5.2, -1.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <-5.2, 5.2, 1.4>, <-5.2, 5.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <5.2, 5.2, 1.4>, <5.2, 5.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <0, -1.2, 1.4>, <0, -1.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <0, 5.2, 1.4>, <0, 5.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue }   In order to create the matrix of pins that make up the pin board I used a basic console application with a few nested loops to create two intersecting matrixes of pins, which models the layout used in the pin boards. The resulting image is shown below. The pin board contains 11,481 pins, with the scene file containing 23,709 lines of code. For the complete animation 2,000 scene files will be created, which is over 47 million lines of code. Each pin in the pin-board will slide out a specific distance when an object is pressed into the back of the board. This is easily modeled by setting the Z coordinate of the pin to a specific value. In order to set all of the pins in the pin-board to the correct position, a bitmap image can be used. The position of the pin can be set based on the color of the pixel at the appropriate position in the image. When the Windows Azure logo is used to set the Z coordinate of the pins, the following image is generated. The challenge now was to make a cool animation. The Azure Logo is fine, but it is static. Using a normal video to animate the pins would not work; the colors in the video would not be the same as the depth of the objects from the camera. In order to simulate the pin board accurately a series of frames from a depth camera could be used. Windows Kinect The Kenect controllers for the X-Box 360 and Windows feature a depth camera. The Kinect SDK for Windows provides a programming interface for Kenect, providing easy access for .NET developers to the Kinect sensors. The Kinect Explorer provided with the Kinect SDK is a great starting point for exploring Kinect from a developers perspective. Both the X-Box 360 Kinect and the Windows Kinect will work with the Kinect SDK, the Windows Kinect is required for commercial applications, but the X-Box Kinect can be used for hobby projects. The Windows Kinect has the advantage of providing a mode to allow depth capture with objects closer to the camera, which makes for a more accurate depth image for setting the pin positions. Creating a Depth Field Animation The depth field animation used to set the positions of the pin in the pin board was created using a modified version of the Kinect Explorer sample application. In order to simulate the pin board accurately, a small section of the depth range from the depth sensor will be used. Any part of the object in front of the depth range will result in a white pixel; anything behind the depth range will be black. Within the depth range the pixels in the image will be set to RGB values from 0,0,0 to 255,255,255. A screen shot of the modified Kinect Explorer application is shown below. The Kinect Explorer sample application was modified to include slider controls that are used to set the depth range that forms the image from the depth stream. This allows the fine tuning of the depth image that is required for simulating the position of the pins in the pin board. The Kinect Explorer was also modified to record a series of images from the depth camera and save them as a sequence JPEG files that will be used to animate the pins in the animation the Start and Stop buttons are used to start and stop the image recording. En example of one of the depth images is shown below. Once a series of 2,000 depth images has been captured, the task of creating the animation can begin. Rendering a Test Frame In order to test the creation of frames and get an approximation of the time required to render each frame a test frame was rendered on-premise using PolyRay. The output of the rendering process is shown below. The test frame contained 23,629 primitive shapes, most of which are the spheres and cylinders that are used for the 11,800 or so pins in the pin board. The 1280x720 image contains 921,600 pixels, but as anti-aliasing was used the number of rays that were calculated was 4,235,777, with 3,478,754,073 object boundaries checked. The test frame of the pin board with the depth field image applied is shown below. The tracing time for the test frame was 4 minutes 27 seconds, which means rendering the2,000 frames in the animation would take over 148 hours, or a little over 6 days. Although this is much faster that an old 486, waiting almost a week to see the results of an animation would make it challenging for animators to create, view, and refine their animations. It would be much better if the animation could be rendered in less than one hour. Windows Azure Worker Roles The cost of creating an on-premise render farm to render animations increases in proportion to the number of servers. The table below shows the cost of servers for creating a render farm, assuming a cost of $500 per server. Number of Servers Cost 1 $500 16 $8,000 256 $128,000   As well as the cost of the servers, there would be additional costs for networking, racks etc. Hosting an environment of 256 servers on-premise would require a server room with cooling, and some pretty hefty power cabling. The Windows Azure compute services provide worker roles, which are ideal for performing processor intensive compute tasks. With the scalability available in Windows Azure a job that takes 256 hours to complete could be perfumed using different numbers of worker roles. The time and cost of using 1, 16 or 256 worker roles is shown below. Number of Worker Roles Render Time Cost 1 256 hours $30.72 16 16 hours $30.72 256 1 hour $30.72   Using worker roles in Windows Azure provides the same cost for the 256 hour job, irrespective of the number of worker roles used. Provided the compute task can be broken down into many small units, and the worker role compute power can be used effectively, it makes sense to scale the application so that the task is completed quickly, making the results available in a timely fashion. The task of rendering 2,000 frames in an animation is one that can easily be broken down into 2,000 individual pieces, which can be performed by a number of worker roles. Creating a Render Farm in Windows Azure The architecture of the render farm is shown in the following diagram. The render farm is a hybrid application with the following components: ·         On-Premise o   Windows Kinect – Used combined with the Kinect Explorer to create a stream of depth images. o   Animation Creator – This application uses the depth images from the Kinect sensor to create scene description files for PolyRay. These files are then uploaded to the jobs blob container, and job messages added to the jobs queue. o   Process Monitor – This application queries the role instance lifecycle table and displays statistics about the render farm environment and render process. o   Image Downloader – This application polls the image queue and downloads the rendered animation files once they are complete. ·         Windows Azure o   Azure Storage – Queues and blobs are used for the scene description files and completed frames. A table is used to store the statistics about the rendering environment.   The architecture of each worker role is shown below.   The worker role is configured to use local storage, which provides file storage on the worker role instance that can be use by the applications to render the image and transform the format of the image. The service definition for the worker role with the local storage configuration highlighted is shown below. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceDefinition name="CloudRay" >   <WorkerRole name="CloudRayWorkerRole" vmsize="Small">     <Imports>     </Imports>     <ConfigurationSettings>       <Setting name="DataConnectionString" />     </ConfigurationSettings>     <LocalResources>       <LocalStorage name="RayFolder" cleanOnRoleRecycle="true" />     </LocalResources>   </WorkerRole> </ServiceDefinition>     The two executable programs, PolyRay.exe and DTA.exe are included in the Azure project, with Copy Always set as the property. PolyRay will take the scene description file and render it to a Truevision TGA file. As the TGA format has not seen much use since the mid 90’s it is converted to a JPG image using Dave's Targa Animator, another shareware application from the 90’s. Each worker roll will use the following process to render the animation frames. 1.       The worker process polls the job queue, if a job is available the scene description file is downloaded from blob storage to local storage. 2.       PolyRay.exe is started in a process with the appropriate command line arguments to render the image as a TGA file. 3.       DTA.exe is started in a process with the appropriate command line arguments convert the TGA file to a JPG file. 4.       The JPG file is uploaded from local storage to the images blob container. 5.       A message is placed on the images queue to indicate a new image is available for download. 6.       The job message is deleted from the job queue. 7.       The role instance lifecycle table is updated with statistics on the number of frames rendered by the worker role instance, and the CPU time used. The code for this is shown below. public override void Run() {     // Set environment variables     string polyRayPath = Path.Combine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("RoleRoot"), PolyRayLocation);     string dtaPath = Path.Combine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("RoleRoot"), DTALocation);       LocalResource rayStorage = RoleEnvironment.GetLocalResource("RayFolder");     string localStorageRootPath = rayStorage.RootPath;       JobQueue jobQueue = new JobQueue("renderjobs");     JobQueue downloadQueue = new JobQueue("renderimagedownloadjobs");     CloudRayBlob sceneBlob = new CloudRayBlob("scenes");     CloudRayBlob imageBlob = new CloudRayBlob("images");     RoleLifecycleDataSource roleLifecycleDataSource = new RoleLifecycleDataSource();       Frames = 0;       while (true)     {         // Get the render job from the queue         CloudQueueMessage jobMsg = jobQueue.Get();           if (jobMsg != null)         {             // Get the file details             string sceneFile = jobMsg.AsString;             string tgaFile = sceneFile.Replace(".pi", ".tga");             string jpgFile = sceneFile.Replace(".pi", ".jpg");               string sceneFilePath = Path.Combine(localStorageRootPath, sceneFile);             string tgaFilePath = Path.Combine(localStorageRootPath, tgaFile);             string jpgFilePath = Path.Combine(localStorageRootPath, jpgFile);               // Copy the scene file to local storage             sceneBlob.DownloadFile(sceneFilePath);               // Run the ray tracer.             string polyrayArguments =                 string.Format("\"{0}\" -o \"{1}\" -a 2", sceneFilePath, tgaFilePath);             Process polyRayProcess = new Process();             polyRayProcess.StartInfo.FileName =                 Path.Combine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("RoleRoot"), polyRayPath);             polyRayProcess.StartInfo.Arguments = polyrayArguments;             polyRayProcess.Start();             polyRayProcess.WaitForExit();               // Convert the image             string dtaArguments =                 string.Format(" {0} /FJ /P{1}", tgaFilePath, Path.GetDirectoryName (jpgFilePath));             Process dtaProcess = new Process();             dtaProcess.StartInfo.FileName =                 Path.Combine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("RoleRoot"), dtaPath);             dtaProcess.StartInfo.Arguments = dtaArguments;             dtaProcess.Start();             dtaProcess.WaitForExit();               // Upload the image to blob storage             imageBlob.UploadFile(jpgFilePath);               // Add a download job.             downloadQueue.Add(jpgFile);               // Delete the render job message             jobQueue.Delete(jobMsg);               Frames++;         }         else         {             Thread.Sleep(1000);         }           // Log the worker role activity.         roleLifecycleDataSource.Alive             ("CloudRayWorker", RoleLifecycleDataSource.RoleLifecycleId, Frames);     } }     Monitoring Worker Role Instance Lifecycle In order to get more accurate statistics about the lifecycle of the worker role instances used to render the animation data was tracked in an Azure storage table. The following class was used to track the worker role lifecycles in Azure storage.   public class RoleLifecycle : TableServiceEntity {     public string ServerName { get; set; }     public string Status { get; set; }     public DateTime StartTime { get; set; }     public DateTime EndTime { get; set; }     public long SecondsRunning { get; set; }     public DateTime LastActiveTime { get; set; }     public int Frames { get; set; }     public string Comment { get; set; }       public RoleLifecycle()     {     }       public RoleLifecycle(string roleName)     {         PartitionKey = roleName;         RowKey = Utils.GetAscendingRowKey();         Status = "Started";         StartTime = DateTime.UtcNow;         LastActiveTime = StartTime;         EndTime = StartTime;         SecondsRunning = 0;         Frames = 0;     } }     A new instance of this class is created and added to the storage table when the role starts. It is then updated each time the worker renders a frame to record the total number of frames rendered and the total processing time. These statistics are used be the monitoring application to determine the effectiveness of use of resources in the render farm. Rendering the Animation The Azure solution was deployed to Windows Azure with the service configuration set to 16 worker role instances. This allows for the application to be tested in the cloud environment, and the performance of the application determined. When I demo the application at conferences and user groups I often start with 16 instances, and then scale up the application to the full 256 instances. The configuration to run 16 instances is shown below. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceConfiguration serviceName="CloudRay" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceConfiguration" osFamily="1" osVersion="*">   <Role name="CloudRayWorkerRole">     <Instances count="16" />     <ConfigurationSettings>       <Setting name="DataConnectionString"         value="DefaultEndpointsProtocol=https;AccountName=cloudraydata;AccountKey=..." />     </ConfigurationSettings>   </Role> </ServiceConfiguration>     About six minutes after deploying the application the first worker roles become active and start to render the first frames of the animation. The CloudRay Monitor application displays an icon for each worker role instance, with a number indicating the number of frames that the worker role has rendered. The statistics on the left show the number of active worker roles and statistics about the render process. The render time is the time since the first worker role became active; the CPU time is the total amount of processing time used by all worker role instances to render the frames.   Five minutes after the first worker role became active the last of the 16 worker roles activated. By this time the first seven worker roles had each rendered one frame of the animation.   With 16 worker roles u and running it can be seen that one hour and 45 minutes CPU time has been used to render 32 frames with a render time of just under 10 minutes.     At this rate it would take over 10 hours to render the 2,000 frames of the full animation. In order to complete the animation in under an hour more processing power will be required. Scaling the render farm from 16 instances to 256 instances is easy using the new management portal. The slider is set to 256 instances, and the configuration saved. We do not need to re-deploy the application, and the 16 instances that are up and running will not be affected. Alternatively, the configuration file for the Azure service could be modified to specify 256 instances.   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceConfiguration serviceName="CloudRay" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceConfiguration" osFamily="1" osVersion="*">   <Role name="CloudRayWorkerRole">     <Instances count="256" />     <ConfigurationSettings>       <Setting name="DataConnectionString"         value="DefaultEndpointsProtocol=https;AccountName=cloudraydata;AccountKey=..." />     </ConfigurationSettings>   </Role> </ServiceConfiguration>     Six minutes after the new configuration has been applied 75 new worker roles have activated and are processing their first frames.   Five minutes later the full configuration of 256 worker roles is up and running. We can see that the average rate of frame rendering has increased from 3 to 12 frames per minute, and that over 17 hours of CPU time has been utilized in 23 minutes. In this test the time to provision 140 worker roles was about 11 minutes, which works out at about one every five seconds.   We are now half way through the rendering, with 1,000 frames complete. This has utilized just under three days of CPU time in a little over 35 minutes.   The animation is now complete, with 2,000 frames rendered in a little over 52 minutes. The CPU time used by the 256 worker roles is 6 days, 7 hours and 22 minutes with an average frame rate of 38 frames per minute. The rendering of the last 1,000 frames took 16 minutes 27 seconds, which works out at a rendering rate of 60 frames per minute. The frame counts in the server instances indicate that the use of a queue to distribute the workload has been very effective in distributing the load across the 256 worker role instances. The first 16 instances that were deployed first have rendered between 11 and 13 frames each, whilst the 240 instances that were added when the application was scaled have rendered between 6 and 9 frames each.   Completed Animation I’ve uploaded the completed animation to YouTube, a low resolution preview is shown below. Pin Board Animation Created using Windows Kinect and 256 Windows Azure Worker Roles   The animation can be viewed in 1280x720 resolution at the following link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5jy6bvSxWc Effective Use of Resources According to the CloudRay monitor statistics the animation took 6 days, 7 hours and 22 minutes CPU to render, this works out at 152 hours of compute time, rounded up to the nearest hour. As the usage for the worker role instances are billed for the full hour, it may have been possible to render the animation using fewer than 256 worker roles. When deciding the optimal usage of resources, the time required to provision and start the worker roles must also be considered. In the demo I started with 16 worker roles, and then scaled the application to 256 worker roles. It would have been more optimal to start the application with maybe 200 worker roles, and utilized the full hour that I was being billed for. This would, however, have prevented showing the ease of scalability of the application. The new management portal displays the CPU usage across the worker roles in the deployment. The average CPU usage across all instances is 93.27%, with over 99% used when all the instances are up and running. This shows that the worker role resources are being used very effectively. Grid Computing Scenarios Although I am using this scenario for a hobby project, there are many scenarios where a large amount of compute power is required for a short period of time. Windows Azure provides a great platform for developing these types of grid computing applications, and can work out very cost effective. ·         Windows Azure can provide massive compute power, on demand, in a matter of minutes. ·         The use of queues to manage the load balancing of jobs between role instances is a simple and effective solution. ·         Using a cloud-computing platform like Windows Azure allows proof-of-concept scenarios to be tested and evaluated on a very low budget. ·         No charges for inbound data transfer makes the uploading of large data sets to Windows Azure Storage services cost effective. (Transaction charges still apply.) Tips for using Windows Azure for Grid Computing Scenarios I found the implementation of a render farm using Windows Azure a fairly simple scenario to implement. I was impressed by ease of scalability that Azure provides, and by the short time that the application took to scale from 16 to 256 worker role instances. In this case it was around 13 minutes, in other tests it took between 10 and 20 minutes. The following tips may be useful when implementing a grid computing project in Windows Azure. ·         Using an Azure Storage queue to load-balance the units of work across multiple worker roles is simple and very effective. The design I have used in this scenario could easily scale to many thousands of worker role instances. ·         Windows Azure accounts are typically limited to 20 cores. If you need to use more than this, a call to support and a credit card check will be required. ·         Be aware of how the billing model works. You will be charged for worker role instances for the full clock our in which the instance is deployed. Schedule the workload to start just after the clock hour has started. ·         Monitor the utilization of the resources you are provisioning, ensure that you are not paying for worker roles that are idle. ·         If you are deploying third party applications to worker roles, you may well run into licensing issues. Purchasing software licenses on a per-processor basis when using hundreds of processors for a short time period would not be cost effective. ·         Third party software may also require installation onto the worker roles, which can be accomplished using start-up tasks. Bear in mind that adding a startup task and possible re-boot will add to the time required for the worker role instance to start and activate. An alternative may be to use a prepared VM and use VM roles. ·         Consider using the Windows Azure Autoscaling Application Block (WASABi) to autoscale the worker roles in your application. When using a large number of worker roles, the utilization must be carefully monitored, if the scaling algorithms are not optimal it could get very expensive!

  Read the article

• A first look at ConfORM - Part 1

  - by thangchung

  All source codes for this post can be found at here.Have you ever heard of ConfORM is not? I have read it three months ago when I wrote an post about NHibernate and Autofac. At that time, this project really has just started and still in beta version, so I still do not really care much. But recently when reading a book by Jason Dentler NHibernate 3.0 Cookbook, I started to pay attention to it. Author have mentioned quite a lot of OSS in his book. And now again I have reviewed ConfORM once again. I have been involved in ConfORM development group on google and read some articles about it. Fabio Maulo spent a lot of work for the OSS, and I hope it will adapt a great way for NHibernate (because he contributed to NHibernate that). So what is ConfORM? It is stand for Configuration ORM, and it was trying to use a lot of heuristic model for identifying entities from C# code. Today, it's mostly Model First Driven development, so the first thing is to build the entity model. This is really important and we can see it is the heart of business software. Then we have to tell DB about the entity of this model. We often will use Inversion Engineering here, Database Schema is will create based on recently Entity Model. From now we will absolutely not interested in the DB again, only focus on the Entity Model.Fluent NHibenate really good, I liked this OSS. Sharp Architecture and has done so well in Fluent NHibernate integration with applications. A Multiple Database technical in Sharp Architecture is truly awesome. It can receive configuration, a connection string and a dll containing entity model, which would then create a SessionFactory, finally caching inside the computer memory. As the number of SessionFactory can be very large and will full of the memory, it has also devised a way of caching SessionFactory in the file. This post I hope this will not completely explain about and building a model of multiple databases. I just tried to mount a number of posts from the community and apply some of my knowledge to build a management model Session for ConfORM.As well as Fluent NHibernate, ConfORM also supported on the interface mapping, see this to understand it. So the first thing we will build the Entity Model for it, and here is what I will use the model for this article. A simple model for managing news and polls, it will be too easy for a number of people, but I hope not to bring complexity to this post.I will then have some code to build super type for the Entity Model. public interface IEntity<TId>    {        TId Id { get; set; }    } public abstract class EntityBase<TId> : IEntity<TId>    {        public virtual TId Id { get; set; }         public override bool Equals(object obj)        {            return Equals(obj as EntityBase<TId>);        }         private static bool IsTransient(EntityBase<TId> obj)        {            return obj != null &&            Equals(obj.Id, default(TId));        }         private Type GetUnproxiedType()        {            return GetType();        }         public virtual bool Equals(EntityBase<TId> other)        {            if (other == null)                return false;            if (ReferenceEquals(this, other))                return true;            if (!IsTransient(this) &&            !IsTransient(other) &&            Equals(Id, other.Id))            {                var otherType = other.GetUnproxiedType();                var thisType = GetUnproxiedType();                return thisType.IsAssignableFrom(otherType) ||                otherType.IsAssignableFrom(thisType);            }            return false;        }         public override int GetHashCode()        {            if (Equals(Id, default(TId)))                return base.GetHashCode();            return Id.GetHashCode();        }    } Database schema will be created as:The next step is to build the ConORM builder to create a NHibernate Configuration. Patrick have a excellent article about it at here. Contract of it below: public interface IConfigBuilder    {        Configuration BuildConfiguration(string connectionString, string sessionFactoryName);    } The idea here is that I will pass in a connection string and a set of the DLL containing the Entity Model and it makes me a NHibernate Configuration (shame that I stole this ideas of Sharp Architecture). And here is its code: public abstract class ConfORMConfigBuilder : RootObject, IConfigBuilder    {        private static IConfigurator _configurator;         protected IEnumerable<Type> DomainTypes;         private readonly IEnumerable<string> _assemblies;         protected ConfORMConfigBuilder(IEnumerable<string> assemblies)            : this(new Configurator(), assemblies)        {            _assemblies = assemblies;        }         protected ConfORMConfigBuilder(IConfigurator configurator, IEnumerable<string> assemblies)        {            _configurator = configurator;            _assemblies = assemblies;        }         public abstract void GetDatabaseIntegration(IDbIntegrationConfigurationProperties dBIntegration, string connectionString);         protected abstract HbmMapping GetMapping();         public Configuration BuildConfiguration(string connectionString, string sessionFactoryName)        {            Contract.Requires(!string.IsNullOrEmpty(connectionString), "ConnectionString is null or empty");            Contract.Requires(!string.IsNullOrEmpty(sessionFactoryName), "SessionFactory name is null or empty");            Contract.Requires(_configurator != null, "Configurator is null");             return CatchExceptionHelper.TryCatchFunction(                () =>                {                    DomainTypes = GetTypeOfEntities(_assemblies);                     if (DomainTypes == null)                        throw new Exception("Type of domains is null");                     var configure = new Configuration();                    configure.SessionFactoryName(sessionFactoryName);                     configure.Proxy(p => p.ProxyFactoryFactory<ProxyFactoryFactory>());                    configure.DataBaseIntegration(db => GetDatabaseIntegration(db, connectionString));                     if (_configurator.GetAppSettingString("IsCreateNewDatabase").ConvertToBoolean())                    {                        configure.SetProperty("hbm2ddl.auto", "create-drop");                    }                     configure.Properties.Add("default_schema", _configurator.GetAppSettingString("DefaultSchema"));                    configure.AddDeserializedMapping(GetMapping(),                                                     _configurator.GetAppSettingString("DocumentFileName"));                     SchemaMetadataUpdater.QuoteTableAndColumns(configure);                     return configure;                }, Logger);        }         protected IEnumerable<Type> GetTypeOfEntities(IEnumerable<string> assemblies)        {            var type = typeof(EntityBase<Guid>);            var domainTypes = new List<Type>();             foreach (var assembly in assemblies)            {                var realAssembly = Assembly.LoadFrom(assembly);                 if (realAssembly == null)                    throw new NullReferenceException();                 domainTypes.AddRange(realAssembly.GetTypes().Where(                    t =>                    {                        if (t.BaseType != null)                            return string.Compare(t.BaseType.FullName,                                          type.FullName) == 0;                        return false;                    }));            }             return domainTypes;        }    } I do not want to dependency on any RDBMS, so I made a builder as an abstract class, and so I will create a concrete instance for SQL Server 2008 as follows: public class SqlServerConfORMConfigBuilder : ConfORMConfigBuilder    {        public SqlServerConfORMConfigBuilder(IEnumerable<string> assemblies)            : base(assemblies)        {        }         public override void GetDatabaseIntegration(IDbIntegrationConfigurationProperties dBIntegration, string connectionString)        {            dBIntegration.Dialect<MsSql2008Dialect>();            dBIntegration.Driver<SqlClientDriver>();            dBIntegration.KeywordsAutoImport = Hbm2DDLKeyWords.AutoQuote;            dBIntegration.IsolationLevel = IsolationLevel.ReadCommitted;            dBIntegration.ConnectionString = connectionString;            dBIntegration.LogSqlInConsole = true;            dBIntegration.Timeout = 10;            dBIntegration.LogFormatedSql = true;            dBIntegration.HqlToSqlSubstitutions = "true 1, false 0, yes 'Y', no 'N'";        }         protected override HbmMapping GetMapping()        {            var orm = new ObjectRelationalMapper();             orm.Patterns.PoidStrategies.Add(new GuidPoidPattern());             var patternsAppliers = new CoolPatternsAppliersHolder(orm);            //patternsAppliers.Merge(new DatePropertyByNameApplier()).Merge(new MsSQL2008DateTimeApplier());            patternsAppliers.Merge(new ManyToOneColumnNamingApplier());            patternsAppliers.Merge(new OneToManyKeyColumnNamingApplier(orm));             var mapper = new Mapper(orm, patternsAppliers);             var entities = new List<Type>();             DomainDefinition(orm);            Customize(mapper);             entities.AddRange(DomainTypes);             return mapper.CompileMappingFor(entities);        }         private void DomainDefinition(IObjectRelationalMapper orm)        {            orm.TablePerClassHierarchy(new[] { typeof(EntityBase<Guid>) });            orm.TablePerClass(DomainTypes);             orm.OneToOne<News, Poll>();            orm.ManyToOne<Category, News>();             orm.Cascade<Category, News>(Cascade.All);            orm.Cascade<News, Poll>(Cascade.All);            orm.Cascade<User, Poll>(Cascade.All);        }         private static void Customize(Mapper mapper)        {            CustomizeRelations(mapper);            CustomizeTables(mapper);            CustomizeColumns(mapper);        }         private static void CustomizeRelations(Mapper mapper)        {        }         private static void CustomizeTables(Mapper mapper)        {        }         private static void CustomizeColumns(Mapper mapper)        {            mapper.Class<Category>(                cm =>                {                    cm.Property(x => x.Name, m => m.NotNullable(true));                    cm.Property(x => x.CreatedDate, m => m.NotNullable(true));                });             mapper.Class<News>(                cm =>                {                    cm.Property(x => x.Title, m => m.NotNullable(true));                    cm.Property(x => x.ShortDescription, m => m.NotNullable(true));                    cm.Property(x => x.Content, m => m.NotNullable(true));                });             mapper.Class<Poll>(                cm =>                {                    cm.Property(x => x.Value, m => m.NotNullable(true));                    cm.Property(x => x.VoteDate, m => m.NotNullable(true));                    cm.Property(x => x.WhoVote, m => m.NotNullable(true));                });             mapper.Class<User>(                cm =>                {                    cm.Property(x => x.UserName, m => m.NotNullable(true));                    cm.Property(x => x.Password, m => m.NotNullable(true));                });        }    } As you can see that we can do so many things in this class, such as custom entity relationships, custom binding on the columns, custom table name, ... Here I only made two so-Appliers for OneToMany and ManyToOne relationships, you can refer to it here public class ManyToOneColumnNamingApplier : IPatternApplier<PropertyPath, IManyToOneMapper>    {        #region IPatternApplier<PropertyPath,IManyToOneMapper> Members         public void Apply(PropertyPath subject, IManyToOneMapper applyTo)        {            applyTo.Column(subject.ToColumnName() + "Id");        }         #endregion         #region IPattern<PropertyPath> Members         public bool Match(PropertyPath subject)        {            return subject != null;        }         #endregion    } public class OneToManyKeyColumnNamingApplier : OneToManyPattern, IPatternApplier<PropertyPath, ICollectionPropertiesMapper>    {        public OneToManyKeyColumnNamingApplier(IDomainInspector domainInspector) : base(domainInspector) { }         #region Implementation of IPattern<PropertyPath>         public bool Match(PropertyPath subject)        {            return Match(subject.LocalMember);        }         #endregion Implementation of IPattern<PropertyPath>         #region Implementation of IPatternApplier<PropertyPath,ICollectionPropertiesMapper>         public void Apply(PropertyPath subject, ICollectionPropertiesMapper applyTo)        {            applyTo.Key(km => km.Column(GetKeyColumnName(subject)));        }         #endregion Implementation of IPatternApplier<PropertyPath,ICollectionPropertiesMapper>         protected virtual string GetKeyColumnName(PropertyPath subject)        {            Type propertyType = subject.LocalMember.GetPropertyOrFieldType();            Type childType = propertyType.DetermineCollectionElementType();            var entity = subject.GetContainerEntity(DomainInspector);            var parentPropertyInChild = childType.GetFirstPropertyOfType(entity);            var baseName = parentPropertyInChild == null ? subject.PreviousPath == null ? entity.Name : entity.Name + subject.PreviousPath : parentPropertyInChild.Name;            return GetKeyColumnName(baseName);        }         protected virtual string GetKeyColumnName(string baseName)        {            return string.Format("{0}Id", baseName);        }    } Everyone also can download the ConfORM source at google code and see example inside it. Next part I will write about multiple database factory. Hope you enjoy about it. happy coding and see you next part.

  Read the article

• Remove/squash entries in a vertical hash

  - by Forkrul Assail

  I have a grid that represents an X, Y matrix, stored as a hash here. Some points on the X Y matrix may have values (as type string), and some may not. A typical grid could look like this: {[9, 5]=>"Alaina", [10, 3]=>"Courtney", [11, 1]=>"Gladys", [8, 7]=>"Alford", [14, 11]=>"Lesley", [17, 2]=>"Lawson", [0, 5]=>"Katrine", [2, 1]=>"Tyra", [3, 3]=>"Fredy", [1, 7]=>"Magnus", [6, 9]=>"Nels", [7, 11]=>"Kylie", [11, 0]=>"Kellen", [10, 2]=>"Johan", [14, 10]=>"Justice", [0, 4]=>"Barton", [2, 0]=>"Charley", [3, 2]=>"Magnolia", [1, 6]=>"Maximo", [7, 10]=>"Olga", [19, 5]=>"Isadore", [16, 3]=>"Delfina", [17, 1]=>"Noe", [20, 11]=>"Francis", [10, 5]=>"Creola", [9, 3]=>"Bulah", [8, 1]=>"Lempi", [11, 7]=>"Raquel", [13, 11]=>"Jace", [1, 5]=>"Garth", [3, 1]=>"Ernest", [2, 3]=>"Malcolm", [0, 7]=>"Alejandrin", [7, 9]=>"Marina", [6, 11]=>"Otilia", [16, 2]=>"Hailey", [20, 10]=>"Brandt", [8, 0]=>"Madeline", [9, 2]=>"Leanne", [13, 10]=>"Jenifer", [1, 4]=>"Humberto", [3, 0]=>"Nicholaus", [2, 2]=>"Nadia", [0, 6]=>"Abigail", [6, 10]=>"Zola", [20, 5]=>"Clementina", [23, 3]=>"Alvah", [19, 11]=>"Wallace", [11, 5]=>"Tracey", [8, 3]=>"Hulda", [9, 1]=>"Jedidiah", [10, 7]=>"Annetta", [12, 11]=>"Nicole", [2, 5]=>"Alison", [0, 1]=>"Wilma", [1, 3]=>"Shana", [3, 7]=>"Judd", [4, 9]=>"Lucio", [5, 11]=>"Hardy", [19, 10]=>"Immanuel", [9, 0]=>"Uriel", [8, 2]=>"Milton", [12, 10]=>"Elody", [5, 10]=>"Alexanne", [1, 2]=>"Lauretta", [0, 0]=>"Louvenia", [2, 4]=>"Adelia", [21, 5]=>"Erling", [18, 11]=>"Corene", [22, 3]=>"Haskell", [11, 11]=>"Leta", [10, 9]=>"Terrence", [14, 1]=>"Giuseppe", [15, 3]=>"Silas", [12, 5]=>"Johnnie", [4, 11]=>"Aurelie", [5, 9]=>"Meggie", [2, 7]=>"Phoebe", [0, 3]=>"Sister", [1, 1]=>"Violet", [3, 5]=>"Lilian", [18, 10]=>"Eusebio", [11, 10]=>"Emma", [15, 2]=>"Theodore", [14, 0]=>"Cassidy", [4, 10]=>"Edmund", [2, 6]=>"Claire", [0, 2]=>"Madisen", [1, 0]=>"Kasey", [3, 4]=>"Elijah", [17, 11]=>"Susana", [20, 1]=>"Nicklaus", [21, 3]=>"Kelsie", [10, 11]=>"Garnett", [11, 9]=>"Emanuel", [15, 1]=>"Louvenia", [14, 3]=>"Otho", [13, 5]=>"Vincenza", [3, 11]=>"Tate", [2, 9]=>"Beau", [5, 7]=>"Jason", [6, 1]=>"Jayde", [7, 3]=>"Lamont", [4, 5]=>"Curt", [17, 10]=>"Mack", [21, 2]=>"Lilyan", [10, 10]=>"Ruthe", [14, 2]=>"Georgianna", [4, 4]=>"Nyasia", [6, 0]=>"Sadie", [16, 11]=>"Emil", [21, 1]=>"Melba", [20, 3]=>"Delia", [3, 10]=>"Rosalee", [2, 8]=>"Myrtle", [7, 2]=>"Rigoberto", [14, 5]=>"Jedidiah", [13, 3]=>"Flavie", [12, 1]=>"Evie", [8, 9]=>"Olaf", [9, 11]=>"Stan", [20, 2]=>"Judge", [5, 5]=>"Cassie", [7, 1]=>"Gracie", [6, 3]=>"Armando", [4, 7]=>"Delia", [3, 9]=>"Marley", [16, 10]=>"Robyn", [2, 11]=>"Richie", [12, 0]=>"Gilberto", [13, 2]=>"Dedrick", [9, 10]=>"Liam", [5, 4]=>"Jabari", [7, 0]=>"Enola", [6, 2]=>"Lela", [3, 8]=>"Jade", [2, 10]=>"Johnson", [15, 5]=>"Willow", [12, 3]=>"Fredrick", [13, 1]=>"Beau", [9, 9]=>"Carlie", [8, 11]=>"Daisha", [6, 5]=>"Declan", [4, 1]=>"Carolina", [5, 3]=>"Cruz", [7, 7]=>"Jaime", [0, 9]=>"Anthony", [1, 11]=>"Esta", [13, 0]=>"Shaina", [12, 2]=>"Alec", [8, 10]=>"Lora", [6, 4]=>"Emely", [4, 0]=>"Rodger", [5, 2]=>"Cedrick", [0, 8]=>"Collin", [1, 10]=>"Armani", [16, 5]=>"Brooks", [19, 3]=>"Eleanora", [18, 1]=>"Alva", [7, 5]=>"Melissa", [5, 1]=>"Tabitha", [4, 3]=>"Aniya", [6, 7]=>"Marc", [1, 9]=>"Marjorie", [0, 11]=>"Arvilla", [19, 2]=>"Adela", [7, 4]=>"Zakary", [5, 0]=>"Emely", [4, 2]=>"Alison", [1, 8]=>"Lorenz", [0, 10]=>"Lisandro", [17, 5]=>"Aylin", [18, 3]=>"Giles", [19, 1]=>"Kyleigh", [8, 5]=>"Mary", [11, 3]=>"Claire", [10, 1]=>"Avis", [9, 7]=>"Manuela", [15, 11]=>"Chesley", [18, 2]=>"Kristopher", [24, 3]=>"Zola", [8, 4]=>"Pietro", [10, 0]=>"Delores", [11, 2]=>"Timmy", [15, 10]=>"Khalil", [18, 5]=>"Trudie", [17, 3]=>"Rafael", [16, 1]=>"Anthony"} What I need to do though, is basically remove all the empty entries. Let's say [17,3] = Raphael does not have an element in front of if (let's say - no [16,3] exists) then [17,3] should become [16,3] etc. So basically all empty items will be popped off the vertical (row) structure of the hash. Are there functions I should have a look at or is there an easy squash-like method that would just remove blanks and adjust and move other items? Thanks in advance for your help.

  Read the article

• Hosting the Razor Engine for Templating in Non-Web Applications

  - by Rick Strahl

  Microsoft’s new Razor HTML Rendering Engine that is currently shipping with ASP.NET MVC previews can be used outside of ASP.NET. Razor is an alternative view engine that can be used instead of the ASP.NET Page engine that currently works with ASP.NET WebForms and MVC. It provides a simpler and more readable markup syntax and is much more light weight in terms of functionality than the full blown WebForms Page engine, focusing only on features that are more along the lines of a pure view engine (or classic ASP!) with focus on expression and code rendering rather than a complex control/object model. Like the Page engine though, the parser understands .NET code syntax which can be embedded into templates, and behind the scenes the engine compiles markup and script code into an executing piece of .NET code in an assembly. Although it ships as part of the ASP.NET MVC and WebMatrix the Razor Engine itself is not directly dependent on ASP.NET or IIS or HTTP in any way. And although there are some markup and rendering features that are optimized for HTML based output generation, Razor is essentially a free standing template engine. And what’s really nice is that unlike the ASP.NET Runtime, Razor is fairly easy to host inside of your own non-Web applications to provide templating functionality. Templating in non-Web Applications? Yes please! So why might you host a template engine in your non-Web application? Template rendering is useful in many places and I have a number of applications that make heavy use of it. One of my applications – West Wind Html Help Builder - exclusively uses template based rendering to merge user supplied help text content into customizable and executable HTML markup templates that provide HTML output for CHM style HTML Help. This is an older product and it’s not actually using .NET at the moment – and this is one reason I’m looking at Razor for script hosting at the moment. For a few .NET applications though I’ve actually used the ASP.NET Runtime hosting to provide templating and mail merge style functionality and while that works reasonably well it’s a very heavy handed approach. It’s very resource intensive and has potential issues with versioning in various different versions of .NET. The generic implementation I created in the article above requires a lot of fix up to mimic an HTTP request in a non-HTTP environment and there are a lot of little things that have to happen to ensure that the ASP.NET runtime works properly most of it having nothing to do with the templating aspect but just satisfying ASP.NET’s requirements. The Razor Engine on the other hand is fairly light weight and completely decoupled from the ASP.NET runtime and the HTTP processing. Rather it’s a pure template engine whose sole purpose is to render text templates. Hosting this engine in your own applications can be accomplished with a reasonable amount of code (actually just a few lines with the tools I’m about to describe) and without having to fake HTTP requests. It’s also much lighter on resource usage and you can easily attach custom properties to your base template implementation to easily pass context from the parent application into templates all of which was rather complicated with ASP.NET runtime hosting. Installing the Razor Template Engine You can get Razor as part of the MVC 3 (RC and later) or Web Matrix. Both are available as downloadable components from the Web Platform Installer Version 3.0 (!important – V2 doesn’t show these components). If you already have that version of the WPI installed just fire it up. You can get the latest version of the Web Platform Installer from here: http://www.microsoft.com/web/gallery/install.aspx Once the platform Installer 3.0 is installed install either MVC 3 or ASP.NET Web Pages. Once installed you’ll find a System.Web.Razor assembly in C:\Program Files\Microsoft ASP.NET\ASP.NET Web Pages\v1.0\Assemblies\System.Web.Razor.dll which you can add as a reference to your project. Creating a Wrapper The basic Razor Hosting API is pretty simple and you can host Razor with a (large-ish) handful of lines of code. I’ll show the basics of it later in this article. However, if you want to customize the rendering and handle assembly and namespace includes for the markup as well as deal with text and file inputs as well as forcing Razor to run in a separate AppDomain so you can unload the code-generated assemblies and deal with assembly caching for re-used templates little more work is required to create something that is more easily reusable. For this reason I created a Razor Hosting wrapper project that combines a bunch of this functionality into an easy to use hosting class, a hosting factory that can load the engine in a separate AppDomain and a couple of hosting containers that provided folder based and string based caching for templates for an easily embeddable and reusable engine with easy to use syntax. If you just want the code and play with the samples and source go grab the latest code from the Subversion Repository at: http://www.west-wind.com:8080/svn/articles/trunk/RazorHosting/ or a snapshot from: http://www.west-wind.com/files/tools/RazorHosting.zip Getting Started Before I get into how hosting with Razor works, let’s take a look at how you can get up and running quickly with the wrapper classes provided. It only takes a few lines of code. The easiest way to use these Razor Hosting Wrappers is to use one of the two HostContainers provided. One is for hosting Razor scripts in a directory and rendering them as relative paths from these script files on disk. The other HostContainer serves razor scripts from string templates… Let’s start with a very simple template that displays some simple expressions, some code blocks and demonstrates rendering some data from contextual data that you pass to the template in the form of a ‘context’. Here’s a simple Razor template: @using System.Reflection Hello @Context.FirstName! Your entry was entered on: @Context.Entered @{ // Code block: Update the host Windows Form passed in through the context Context.WinForm.Text = "Hello World from Razor at " + DateTime.Now.ToString(); } AppDomain Id: @AppDomain.CurrentDomain.FriendlyName Assembly: @Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().FullName Code based output: @{ // Write output with Response object from code string output = string.Empty; for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) { output += i.ToString() + " "; } Response.Write(output); } Pretty easy to see what’s going on here. The only unusual thing in this code is the Context object which is an arbitrary object I’m passing from the host to the template by way of the template base class. I’m also displaying the current AppDomain and the executing Assembly name so you can see how compiling and running a template actually loads up new assemblies. Also note that as part of my context I’m passing a reference to the current Windows Form down to the template and changing the title from within the script. It’s a silly example, but it demonstrates two-way communication between host and template and back which can be very powerful. The easiest way to quickly render this template is to use the RazorEngine<TTemplateBase> class. The generic parameter specifies a template base class type that is used by Razor internally to generate the class it generates from a template. The default implementation provided in my RazorHosting wrapper is RazorTemplateBase. Here’s a simple one that renders from a string and outputs a string: var engine = new RazorEngine<RazorTemplateBase>(); // we can pass any object as context - here create a custom context var context = new CustomContext() { WinForm = this, FirstName = "Rick", Entered = DateTime.Now.AddDays(-10) }; string output = engine.RenderTemplate(this.txtSource.Text new string[] { "System.Windows.Forms.dll" }, context); if (output == null) this.txtResult.Text = "*** ERROR:\r\n" + engine.ErrorMessage; else this.txtResult.Text = output; Simple enough. This code renders a template from a string input and returns a result back as a string. It  creates a custom context and passes that to the template which can then access the Context’s properties. Note that anything passed as ‘context’ must be serializable (or MarshalByRefObject) – otherwise you get an exception when passing the reference over AppDomain boundaries (discussed later). Passing a context is optional, but is a key feature in being able to share data between the host application and the template. Note that we use the Context object to access FirstName, Entered and even the host Windows Form object which is used in the template to change the Window caption from within the script! In the code above all the work happens in the RenderTemplate method which provide a variety of overloads to read and write to and from strings, files and TextReaders/Writers. Here’s another example that renders from a file input using a TextReader: using (reader = new StreamReader("templates\\simple.csHtml", true)) { result = host.RenderTemplate(reader, new string[] { "System.Windows.Forms.dll" }, this.CustomContext); } RenderTemplate() is fairly high level and it handles loading of the runtime, compiling into an assembly and rendering of the template. If you want more control you can use the lower level methods to control each step of the way which is important for the HostContainers I’ll discuss later. Basically for those scenarios you want to separate out loading of the engine, compiling into an assembly and then rendering the template from the assembly. Why? So we can keep assemblies cached. In the code above a new assembly is created for each template rendered which is inefficient and uses up resources. Depending on the size of your templates and how often you fire them you can chew through memory very quickly. This slighter lower level approach is only a couple of extra steps: // we can pass any object as context - here create a custom context var context = new CustomContext() { WinForm = this, FirstName = "Rick", Entered = DateTime.Now.AddDays(-10) }; var engine = new RazorEngine<RazorTemplateBase>(); string assId = null; using (StringReader reader = new StringReader(this.txtSource.Text)) { assId = engine.ParseAndCompileTemplate(new string[] { "System.Windows.Forms.dll" }, reader); } string output = engine.RenderTemplateFromAssembly(assId, context); if (output == null) this.txtResult.Text = "*** ERROR:\r\n" + engine.ErrorMessage; else this.txtResult.Text = output; The difference here is that you can capture the assembly – or rather an Id to it – and potentially hold on to it to render again later assuming the template hasn’t changed. The HostContainers take advantage of this feature to cache the assemblies based on certain criteria like a filename and file time step or a string hash that if not change indicate that an assembly can be reused. Note that ParseAndCompileTemplate returns an assembly Id rather than the assembly itself. This is done so that that the assembly always stays in the host’s AppDomain and is not passed across AppDomain boundaries which would cause load failures. We’ll talk more about this in a minute but for now just realize that assemblies references are stored in a list and are accessible by this ID to allow locating and re-executing of the assembly based on that id. Reuse of the assembly avoids recompilation overhead and creation of yet another assembly that loads into the current AppDomain. You can play around with several different versions of the above code in the main sample form:   Using Hosting Containers for more Control and Caching The above examples simply render templates into assemblies each and every time they are executed. While this works and is even reasonably fast, it’s not terribly efficient. If you render templates more than once it would be nice if you could cache the generated assemblies for example to avoid re-compiling and creating of a new assembly each time. Additionally it would be nice to load template assemblies into a separate AppDomain optionally to be able to be able to unload assembli es and also to protect your host application from scripting attacks with malicious template code. Hosting containers provide also provide a wrapper around the RazorEngine<T> instance, a factory (which allows creation in separate AppDomains) and an easy way to start and stop the container ‘runtime’. The Razor Hosting samples provide two hosting containers: RazorFolderHostContainer and StringHostContainer. The folder host provides a simple runtime environment for a folder structure similar in the way that the ASP.NET runtime handles a virtual directory as it’s ‘application' root. Templates are loaded from disk in relative paths and the resulting assemblies are cached unless the template on disk is changed. The string host also caches templates based on string hashes – if the same string is passed a second time a cached version of the assembly is used. Here’s how HostContainers work. I’ll use the FolderHostContainer because it’s likely the most common way you’d use templates – from disk based templates that can be easily edited and maintained on disk. The first step is to create an instance of it and keep it around somewhere (in the example it’s attached as a property to the Form): RazorFolderHostContainer Host = new RazorFolderHostContainer(); public RazorFolderHostForm() { InitializeComponent(); // The base path for templates - templates are rendered with relative paths // based on this path. Host.TemplatePath = Path.Combine(Environment.CurrentDirectory, TemplateBaseFolder); // Add any assemblies you want reference in your templates Host.ReferencedAssemblies.Add("System.Windows.Forms.dll"); // Start up the host container Host.Start(); } Next anytime you want to render a template you can use simple code like this: private void RenderTemplate(string fileName) { // Pass the template path via the Context var relativePath = Utilities.GetRelativePath(fileName, Host.TemplatePath); if (!Host.RenderTemplate(relativePath, this.Context, Host.RenderingOutputFile)) { MessageBox.Show("Error: " + Host.ErrorMessage); return; } this.webBrowser1.Navigate("file://" + Host.RenderingOutputFile); } You can also render the output to a string instead of to a file: string result = Host.RenderTemplateToString(relativePath,context); Finally if you want to release the engine and shut down the hosting AppDomain you can simply do: Host.Stop(); Stopping the AppDomain and restarting it (ie. calling Stop(); followed by Start()) is also a nice way to release all resources in the AppDomain. The FolderBased domain also supports partial Rendering based on root path based relative paths with the same caching characteristics as the main templates. From within a template you can call out to a partial like this: @RenderPartial(@"partials\PartialRendering.cshtml", Context) where partials\PartialRendering.cshtml is a relative to the template root folder. The folder host example lets you load up templates from disk and display the result in a Web Browser control which demonstrates using Razor HTML output from templates that contain HTML syntax which happens to me my target scenario for Html Help Builder.   The Razor Engine Wrapper Project The project I created to wrap Razor hosting has a fair bit of code and a number of classes associated with it. Most of the components are internally used and as you can see using the final RazorEngine<T> and HostContainer classes is pretty easy. The classes are extensible and I suspect developers will want to build more customized host containers for their applications. Host containers are the key to wrapping up all functionality – Engine, BaseTemplate, AppDomain Hosting, Caching etc in a logical piece that is ready to be plugged into an application. When looking at the code there are a couple of core features provided: Core Razor Engine Hosting This is the core Razor hosting which provides the basics of loading a template, compiling it into an assembly and executing it. This is fairly straightforward, but without a host container that can cache assemblies based on some criteria templates are recompiled and re-created each time which is inefficient (although pretty fast). The base engine wrapper implementation also supports hosting the Razor runtime in a separate AppDomain for security and the ability to unload it on demand. Host Containers The engine hosting itself doesn’t provide any sort of ‘runtime’ service like picking up files from disk, caching assemblies and so forth. So my implementation provides two HostContainers: RazorFolderHostContainer and RazorStringHostContainer. The FolderHost works off a base directory and loads templates based on relative paths (sort of like the ASP.NET runtime does off a virtual). The HostContainers also deal with caching of template assemblies – for the folder host the file date is tracked and checked for updates and unless the template is changed a cached assembly is reused. The StringHostContainer similiarily checks string hashes to figure out whether a particular string template was previously compiled and executed. The HostContainers also act as a simple startup environment and a single reference to easily store and reuse in an application. TemplateBase Classes The template base classes are the base classes that from which the Razor engine generates .NET code. A template is parsed into a class with an Execute() method and the class is based on this template type you can specify. RazorEngine<TBaseTemplate> can receive this type and the HostContainers default to specific templates in their base implementations. Template classes are customizable to allow you to create templates that provide application specific features and interaction from the template to your host application. How does the RazorEngine wrapper work? You can browse the source code in the links above or in the repository or download the source, but I’ll highlight some key features here. Here’s part of the RazorEngine implementation that can be used to host the runtime and that demonstrates the key code required to host the Razor runtime. The RazorEngine class is implemented as a generic class to reflect the Template base class type: public class RazorEngine<TBaseTemplateType> : MarshalByRefObject where TBaseTemplateType : RazorTemplateBase The generic type is used to internally provide easier access to the template type and assignments on it as part of the template processing. The class also inherits MarshalByRefObject to allow execution over AppDomain boundaries – something that all the classes discussed here need to do since there is much interaction between the host and the template. The first two key methods deal with creating a template assembly: /// <summary> /// Creates an instance of the RazorHost with various options applied. /// Applies basic namespace imports and the name of the class to generate /// </summary> /// <param name="generatedNamespace"></param> /// <param name="generatedClass"></param> /// <returns></returns> protected RazorTemplateEngine CreateHost(string generatedNamespace, string generatedClass) { Type baseClassType = typeof(TBaseTemplateType); RazorEngineHost host = new RazorEngineHost(new CSharpRazorCodeLanguage()); host.DefaultBaseClass = baseClassType.FullName; host.DefaultClassName = generatedClass; host.DefaultNamespace = generatedNamespace; host.NamespaceImports.Add("System"); host.NamespaceImports.Add("System.Text"); host.NamespaceImports.Add("System.Collections.Generic"); host.NamespaceImports.Add("System.Linq"); host.NamespaceImports.Add("System.IO"); return new RazorTemplateEngine(host); } /// <summary> /// Parses and compiles a markup template into an assembly and returns /// an assembly name. The name is an ID that can be passed to /// ExecuteTemplateByAssembly which picks up a cached instance of the /// loaded assembly. /// /// </summary> /// <param name="namespaceOfGeneratedClass">The namespace of the class to generate from the template</param> /// <param name="generatedClassName">The name of the class to generate from the template</param> /// <param name="ReferencedAssemblies">Any referenced assemblies by dll name only. Assemblies must be in execution path of host or in GAC.</param> /// <param name="templateSourceReader">Textreader that loads the template</param> /// <remarks> /// The actual assembly isn't returned here to allow for cross-AppDomain /// operation. If the assembly was returned it would fail for cross-AppDomain /// calls. /// </remarks> /// <returns>An assembly Id. The Assembly is cached in memory and can be used with RenderFromAssembly.</returns> public string ParseAndCompileTemplate( string namespaceOfGeneratedClass, string generatedClassName, string[] ReferencedAssemblies, TextReader templateSourceReader) { RazorTemplateEngine engine = CreateHost(namespaceOfGeneratedClass, generatedClassName); // Generate the template class as CodeDom GeneratorResults razorResults = engine.GenerateCode(templateSourceReader); // Create code from the codeDom and compile CSharpCodeProvider codeProvider = new CSharpCodeProvider(); CodeGeneratorOptions options = new CodeGeneratorOptions(); // Capture Code Generated as a string for error info // and debugging LastGeneratedCode = null; using (StringWriter writer = new StringWriter()) { codeProvider.GenerateCodeFromCompileUnit(razorResults.GeneratedCode, writer, options); LastGeneratedCode = writer.ToString(); } CompilerParameters compilerParameters = new CompilerParameters(ReferencedAssemblies); // Standard Assembly References compilerParameters.ReferencedAssemblies.Add("System.dll"); compilerParameters.ReferencedAssemblies.Add("System.Core.dll"); compilerParameters.ReferencedAssemblies.Add("Microsoft.CSharp.dll"); // dynamic support! // Also add the current assembly so RazorTemplateBase is available compilerParameters.ReferencedAssemblies.Add(Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().CodeBase.Substring(8)); compilerParameters.GenerateInMemory = Configuration.CompileToMemory; if (!Configuration.CompileToMemory) compilerParameters.OutputAssembly = Path.Combine(Configuration.TempAssemblyPath, "_" + Guid.NewGuid().ToString("n") + ".dll"); CompilerResults compilerResults = codeProvider.CompileAssemblyFromDom(compilerParameters, razorResults.GeneratedCode); if (compilerResults.Errors.Count > 0) { var compileErrors = new StringBuilder(); foreach (System.CodeDom.Compiler.CompilerError compileError in compilerResults.Errors) compileErrors.Append(String.Format(Resources.LineX0TColX1TErrorX2RN, compileError.Line, compileError.Column, compileError.ErrorText)); this.SetError(compileErrors.ToString() + "\r\n" + LastGeneratedCode); return null; } AssemblyCache.Add(compilerResults.CompiledAssembly.FullName, compilerResults.CompiledAssembly); return compilerResults.CompiledAssembly.FullName; } Think of the internal CreateHost() method as setting up the assembly generated from each template. Each template compiles into a separate assembly. It sets up namespaces, and assembly references, the base class used and the name and namespace for the generated class. ParseAndCompileTemplate() then calls the CreateHost() method to receive the template engine generator which effectively generates a CodeDom from the template – the template is turned into .NET code. The code generated from our earlier example looks something like this: //------------------------------------------------------------------------------ // <auto-generated> // This code was generated by a tool. // Runtime Version:4.0.30319.1 // // Changes to this file may cause incorrect behavior and will be lost if // the code is regenerated. // </auto-generated> //------------------------------------------------------------------------------ namespace RazorTest { using System; using System.Text; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.IO; using System.Reflection; public class RazorTemplate : RazorHosting.RazorTemplateBase { #line hidden public RazorTemplate() { } public override void Execute() { WriteLiteral("Hello "); Write(Context.FirstName); WriteLiteral("! Your entry was entered on: "); Write(Context.Entered); WriteLiteral("\r\n\r\n"); // Code block: Update the host Windows Form passed in through the context Context.WinForm.Text = "Hello World from Razor at " + DateTime.Now.ToString(); WriteLiteral("\r\nAppDomain Id:\r\n "); Write(AppDomain.CurrentDomain.FriendlyName); WriteLiteral("\r\n \r\nAssembly:\r\n "); Write(Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().FullName); WriteLiteral("\r\n\r\nCode based output: \r\n"); // Write output with Response object from code string output = string.Empty; for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) { output += i.ToString() + " "; } } } } Basically the template’s body is turned into code in an Execute method that is called. Internally the template’s Write method is fired to actually generate the output. Note that the class inherits from RazorTemplateBase which is the generic parameter I used to specify the base class when creating an instance in my RazorEngine host: var engine = new RazorEngine<RazorTemplateBase>(); This template class must be provided and it must implement an Execute() and Write() method. Beyond that you can create any class you chose and attach your own properties. My RazorTemplateBase class implementation is very simple: public class RazorTemplateBase : MarshalByRefObject, IDisposable { /// <summary> /// You can pass in a generic context object /// to use in your template code /// </summary> public dynamic Context { get; set; } /// <summary> /// Class that generates output. Currently ultra simple /// with only Response.Write() implementation. /// </summary> public RazorResponse Response { get; set; } public object HostContainer {get; set; } public object Engine { get; set; } public RazorTemplateBase() { Response = new RazorResponse(); } public virtual void Write(object value) { Response.Write(value); } public virtual void WriteLiteral(object value) { Response.Write(value); } /// <summary> /// Razor Parser implements this method /// </summary> public virtual void Execute() {} public virtual void Dispose() { if (Response != null) { Response.Dispose(); Response = null; } } } Razor fills in the Execute method when it generates its subclass and uses the Write() method to output content. As you can see I use a RazorResponse() class here to generate output. This isn’t necessary really, as you could use a StringBuilder or StringWriter() directly, but I prefer using Response object so I can extend the Response behavior as needed. The RazorResponse class is also very simple and merely acts as a wrapper around a TextWriter: public class RazorResponse : IDisposable { /// <summary> /// Internal text writer - default to StringWriter() /// </summary> public TextWriter Writer = new StringWriter(); public virtual void Write(object value) { Writer.Write(value); } public virtual void WriteLine(object value) { Write(value); Write("\r\n"); } public virtual void WriteFormat(string format, params object[] args) { Write(string.Format(format, args)); } public override string ToString() { return Writer.ToString(); } public virtual void Dispose() { Writer.Close(); } public virtual void SetTextWriter(TextWriter writer) { // Close original writer if (Writer != null) Writer.Close(); Writer = writer; } } The Rendering Methods of RazorEngine At this point I’ve talked about the assembly generation logic and the template implementation itself. What’s left is that once you’ve generated the assembly is to execute it. The code to do this is handled in the various RenderXXX methods of the RazorEngine class. Let’s look at the lowest level one of these which is RenderTemplateFromAssembly() and a couple of internal support methods that handle instantiating and invoking of the generated template method: public string RenderTemplateFromAssembly( string assemblyId, string generatedNamespace, string generatedClass, object context, TextWriter outputWriter) { this.SetError(); Assembly generatedAssembly = AssemblyCache[assemblyId]; if (generatedAssembly == null) { this.SetError(Resources.PreviouslyCompiledAssemblyNotFound); return null; } string className = generatedNamespace + "." + generatedClass; Type type; try { type = generatedAssembly.GetType(className); } catch (Exception ex) { this.SetError(Resources.UnableToCreateType + className + ": " + ex.Message); return null; } // Start with empty non-error response (if we use a writer) string result = string.Empty; using(TBaseTemplateType instance = InstantiateTemplateClass(type)) { if (instance == null) return null; if (outputWriter != null) instance.Response.SetTextWriter(outputWriter); if (!InvokeTemplateInstance(instance, context)) return null; // Capture string output if implemented and return // otherwise null is returned if (outputWriter == null) result = instance.Response.ToString(); } return result; } protected virtual TBaseTemplateType InstantiateTemplateClass(Type type) { TBaseTemplateType instance = Activator.CreateInstance(type) as TBaseTemplateType; if (instance == null) { SetError(Resources.CouldnTActivateTypeInstance + type.FullName); return null; } instance.Engine = this; // If a HostContainer was set pass that to the template too instance.HostContainer = this.HostContainer; return instance; } /// <summary> /// Internally executes an instance of the template, /// captures errors on execution and returns true or false /// </summary> /// <param name="instance">An instance of the generated template</param> /// <returns>true or false - check ErrorMessage for errors</returns> protected virtual bool InvokeTemplateInstance(TBaseTemplateType instance, object context) { try { instance.Context = context; instance.Execute(); } catch (Exception ex) { this.SetError(Resources.TemplateExecutionError + ex.Message); return false; } finally { // Must make sure Response is closed instance.Response.Dispose(); } return true; } The RenderTemplateFromAssembly method basically requires the namespace and class to instantate and creates an instance of the class using InstantiateTemplateClass(). It then invokes the method with InvokeTemplateInstance(). These two methods are broken out because they are re-used by various other rendering methods and also to allow subclassing and providing additional configuration tasks to set properties and pass values to templates at execution time. In the default mode instantiation sets the Engine and HostContainer (discussed later) so the template can call back into the template engine, and the context is set when the template method is invoked. The various RenderXXX methods use similar code although they create the assemblies first. If you’re after potentially cashing assemblies the method is the one to call and that’s exactly what the two HostContainer classes do. More on that in a minute, but before we get into HostContainers let’s talk about AppDomain hosting and the like. Running Templates in their own AppDomain With the RazorEngine class above, when a template is parsed into an assembly and executed the assembly is created (in memory or on disk – you can configure that) and cached in the current AppDomain. In .NET once an assembly has been loaded it can never be unloaded so if you’re loading lots of templates and at some time you want to release them there’s no way to do so. If however you load the assemblies in a separate AppDomain that new AppDomain can be unloaded and the assemblies loaded in it with it. In order to host the templates in a separate AppDomain the easiest thing to do is to run the entire RazorEngine in a separate AppDomain. Then all interaction occurs in the other AppDomain and no further changes have to be made. To facilitate this there is a RazorEngineFactory which has methods that can instantiate the RazorHost in a separate AppDomain as well as in the local AppDomain. The host creates the remote instance and then hangs on to it to keep it alive as well as providing methods to shut down the AppDomain and reload the engine. Sounds complicated but cross-AppDomain invocation is actually fairly easy to implement. Here’s some of the relevant code from the RazorEngineFactory class. Like the RazorEngine this class is generic and requires a template base type in the generic class name: public class RazorEngineFactory<TBaseTemplateType> where TBaseTemplateType : RazorTemplateBase Here are the key methods of interest: /// <summary> /// Creates an instance of the RazorHost in a new AppDomain. This /// version creates a static singleton that that is cached and you /// can call UnloadRazorHostInAppDomain to unload it. /// </summary> /// <returns></returns> public static RazorEngine<TBaseTemplateType> CreateRazorHostInAppDomain() { if (Current == null) Current = new RazorEngineFactory<TBaseTemplateType>(); return Current.GetRazorHostInAppDomain(); } public static void UnloadRazorHostInAppDomain() { if (Current != null) Current.UnloadHost(); Current = null; } /// <summary> /// Instance method that creates a RazorHost in a new AppDomain. /// This method requires that you keep the Factory around in /// order to keep the AppDomain alive and be able to unload it. /// </summary> /// <returns></returns> public RazorEngine<TBaseTemplateType> GetRazorHostInAppDomain() { LocalAppDomain = CreateAppDomain(null); if (LocalAppDomain == null) return null; /// Create the instance inside of the new AppDomain /// Note: remote domain uses local EXE's AppBasePath!!! RazorEngine<TBaseTemplateType> host = null; try { Assembly ass = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly(); string AssemblyPath = ass.Location; host = (RazorEngine<TBaseTemplateType>) LocalAppDomain.CreateInstanceFrom(AssemblyPath, typeof(RazorEngine<TBaseTemplateType>).FullName).Unwrap(); } catch (Exception ex) { ErrorMessage = ex.Message; return null; } return host; } /// <summary> /// Internally creates a new AppDomain in which Razor templates can /// be run. /// </summary> /// <param name="appDomainName"></param> /// <returns></returns> private AppDomain CreateAppDomain(string appDomainName) { if (appDomainName == null) appDomainName = "RazorHost_" + Guid.NewGuid().ToString("n"); AppDomainSetup setup = new AppDomainSetup(); // *** Point at current directory setup.ApplicationBase = AppDomain.CurrentDomain.BaseDirectory; AppDomain localDomain = AppDomain.CreateDomain(appDomainName, null, setup); return localDomain; } /// <summary> /// Allow unloading of the created AppDomain to release resources /// All internal resources in the AppDomain are released including /// in memory compiled Razor assemblies. /// </summary> public void UnloadHost() { if (this.LocalAppDomain != null) { AppDomain.Unload(this.LocalAppDomain); this.LocalAppDomain = null; } } The static CreateRazorHostInAppDomain() is the key method that startup code usually calls. It uses a Current singleton instance to an instance of itself that is created cross AppDomain and is kept alive because it’s static. GetRazorHostInAppDomain actually creates a cross-AppDomain instance which first creates a new AppDomain and then loads the RazorEngine into it. The remote Proxy instance is returned as a result to the method and can be used the same as a local instance. The code to run with a remote AppDomain is simple: private RazorEngine<RazorTemplateBase> CreateHost() { if (this.Host != null) return this.Host; // Use Static Methods - no error message if host doesn't load this.Host = RazorEngineFactory<RazorTemplateBase>.CreateRazorHostInAppDomain(); if (this.Host == null) { MessageBox.Show("Unable to load Razor Template Host", "Razor Hosting", MessageBoxButtons.OK, MessageBoxIcon.Exclamation); } return this.Host; } This code relies on a local reference of the Host which is kept around for the duration of the app (in this case a form reference). To use this you’d simply do: this.Host = CreateHost(); if (host == null) return; string result = host.RenderTemplate( this.txtSource.Text, new string[] { "System.Windows.Forms.dll", "Westwind.Utilities.dll" }, this.CustomContext); if (result == null) { MessageBox.Show(host.ErrorMessage, "Template Execution Error", MessageBoxButtons.OK, MessageBoxIcon.Exclamation); return; } this.txtResult.Text = result; Now all templates run in a remote AppDomain and can be unloaded with simple code like this: RazorEngineFactory<RazorTemplateBase>.UnloadRazorHostInAppDomain(); this.Host = null; One Step further – Providing a caching ‘Runtime’ Once we can load templates in a remote AppDomain we can add some additional functionality like assembly caching based on application specific features. One of my typical scenarios is to render templates out of a scripts folder. So all templates live in a folder and they change infrequently. So a Folder based host that can compile these templates once and then only recompile them if something changes would be ideal. Enter host containers which are basically wrappers around the RazorEngine<t> and RazorEngineFactory<t>. They provide additional logic for things like file caching based on changes on disk or string hashes for string based template inputs. The folder host also provides for partial rendering logic through a custom template base implementation. There’s a base implementation in RazorBaseHostContainer, which provides the basics for hosting a RazorEngine, which includes the ability to start and stop the engine, cache assemblies and add references: public abstract class RazorBaseHostContainer<TBaseTemplateType> : MarshalByRefObject where TBaseTemplateType : RazorTemplateBase, new() { public RazorBaseHostContainer() { UseAppDomain = true; GeneratedNamespace = "__RazorHost"; } /// <summary> /// Determines whether the Container hosts Razor /// in a separate AppDomain. Seperate AppDomain /// hosting allows unloading and releasing of /// resources. /// </summary> public bool UseAppDomain { get; set; } /// <summary> /// Base folder location where the AppDomain /// is hosted. By default uses the same folder /// as the host application. /// /// Determines where binary dependencies are /// found for assembly references. /// </summary> public string BaseBinaryFolder { get; set; } /// <summary> /// List of referenced assemblies as string values. /// Must be in GAC or in the current folder of the host app/ /// base BinaryFolder /// </summary> public List<string> ReferencedAssemblies = new List<string>(); /// <summary> /// Name of the generated namespace for template classes /// </summary> public string GeneratedNamespace {get; set; } /// <summary> /// Any error messages /// </summary> public string ErrorMessage { get; set; } /// <summary> /// Cached instance of the Host. Required to keep the /// reference to the host alive for multiple uses. /// </summary> public RazorEngine<TBaseTemplateType> Engine; /// <summary> /// Cached instance of the Host Factory - so we can unload /// the host and its associated AppDomain. /// </summary> protected RazorEngineFactory<TBaseTemplateType> EngineFactory; /// <summary> /// Keep track of each compiled assembly /// and when it was compiled. /// /// Use a hash of the string to identify string /// changes. /// </summary> protected Dictionary<int, CompiledAssemblyItem> LoadedAssemblies = new Dictionary<int, CompiledAssemblyItem>(); /// <summary> /// Call to start the Host running. Follow by a calls to RenderTemplate to /// render individual templates. Call Stop when done. /// </summary> /// <returns>true or false - check ErrorMessage on false </returns> public virtual bool Start() { if (Engine == null) { if (UseAppDomain) Engine = RazorEngineFactory<TBaseTemplateType>.CreateRazorHostInAppDomain(); else Engine = RazorEngineFactory<TBaseTemplateType>.CreateRazorHost(); Engine.Configuration.CompileToMemory = true; Engine.HostContainer = this; if (Engine == null) { this.ErrorMessage = EngineFactory.ErrorMessage; return false; } } return true; } /// <summary> /// Stops the Host and releases the host AppDomain and cached /// assemblies. /// </summary> /// <returns>true or false</returns> public bool Stop() { this.LoadedAssemblies.Clear(); RazorEngineFactory<RazorTemplateBase>.UnloadRazorHostInAppDomain(); this.Engine = null; return true; } … } This base class provides most of the mechanics to host the runtime, but no application specific implementation for rendering. There are rendering functions but they just call the engine directly and provide no caching – there’s no context to decide how to cache and reuse templates. The key methods are Start and Stop and their main purpose is to start a new AppDomain (optionally) and shut it down when requested. The RazorFolderHostContainer – Folder Based Runtime Hosting Let’s look at the more application specific RazorFolderHostContainer implementation which is defined like this: public class RazorFolderHostContainer : RazorBaseHostContainer<RazorTemplateFolderHost> Note that a customized RazorTemplateFolderHost class template is used for this implementation that supports partial rendering in form of a RenderPartial() method that’s available to templates. The folder host’s features are: Render templates based on a Template Base Path (a ‘virtual’ if you will) Cache compiled assemblies based on the relative path and file time stamp File changes on templates cause templates to be recompiled into new assemblies Support for partial rendering using base folder relative pathing As shown in the startup examples earlier host containers require some startup code with a HostContainer tied to a persistent property (like a Form property): // The base path for templates - templates are rendered with relative paths // based on this path. HostContainer.TemplatePath = Path.Combine(Environment.CurrentDirectory, TemplateBaseFolder); // Default output rendering disk location HostContainer.RenderingOutputFile = Path.Combine(HostContainer.TemplatePath, "__Preview.htm"); // Add any assemblies you want reference in your templates HostContainer.ReferencedAssemblies.Add("System.Windows.Forms.dll"); // Start up the host container HostContainer.Start(); Once that’s done, you can render templates with the host container: // Pass the template path for full filename seleted with OpenFile Dialog // relativepath is: subdir\file.cshtml or file.cshtml or ..\file.cshtml var relativePath = Utilities.GetRelativePath(fileName, HostContainer.TemplatePath); if (!HostContainer.RenderTemplate(relativePath, Context, HostContainer.RenderingOutputFile)) { MessageBox.Show("Error: " + HostContainer.ErrorMessage); return; } webBrowser1.Navigate("file://" + HostContainer.RenderingOutputFile); The most critical task of the RazorFolderHostContainer implementation is to retrieve a template from disk, compile and cache it and then deal with deciding whether subsequent requests need to re-compile the template or simply use a cached version. Internally the GetAssemblyFromFileAndCache() handles this task: /// <summary> /// Internally checks if a cached assembly exists and if it does uses it /// else creates and compiles one. Returns an assembly Id to be /// used with the LoadedAssembly list. /// </summary> /// <param name="relativePath"></param> /// <param name="context"></param> /// <returns></returns> protected virtual CompiledAssemblyItem GetAssemblyFromFileAndCache(string relativePath) { string fileName = Path.Combine(TemplatePath, relativePath).ToLower(); int fileNameHash = fileName.GetHashCode(); if (!File.Exists(fileName)) { this.SetError(Resources.TemplateFileDoesnTExist + fileName); return null; } CompiledAssemblyItem item = null; this.LoadedAssemblies.TryGetValue(fileNameHash, out item); string assemblyId = null; // Check for cached instance if (item != null) { var fileTime = File.GetLastWriteTimeUtc(fileName); if (fileTime <= item.CompileTimeUtc) assemblyId = item.AssemblyId; } else item = new CompiledAssemblyItem(); // No cached instance - create assembly and cache if (assemblyId == null) { string safeClassName = GetSafeClassName(fileName); StreamReader reader = null; try { reader = new StreamReader(fileName, true); } catch (Exception ex) { this.SetError(Resources.ErrorReadingTemplateFile + fileName); return null; } assemblyId = Engine.ParseAndCompileTemplate(this.ReferencedAssemblies.ToArray(), reader); // need to ensure reader is closed if (reader != null) reader.Close(); if (assemblyId == null) { this.SetError(Engine.ErrorMessage); return null; } item.AssemblyId = assemblyId; item.CompileTimeUtc = DateTime.UtcNow; item.FileName = fileName; item.SafeClassName = safeClassName; this.LoadedAssemblies[fileNameHash] = item; } return item; } This code uses a LoadedAssembly dictionary which is comprised of a structure that holds a reference to a compiled assembly, a full filename and file timestamp and an assembly id. LoadedAssemblies (defined on the base class shown earlier) is essentially a cache for compiled assemblies and they are identified by a hash id. In the case of files the hash is a GetHashCode() from the full filename of the template. The template is checked for in the cache and if not found the file stamp is checked. If that’s newer than the cache’s compilation date the template is recompiled otherwise the version in the cache is used. All the core work defers to a RazorEngine<T> instance to ParseAndCompileTemplate(). The three rendering specific methods then are rather simple implementations with just a few lines of code dealing with parameter and return value parsing: /// <summary> /// Renders a template to a TextWriter. Useful to write output into a stream or /// the Response object. Used for partial rendering. /// </summary> /// <param name="relativePath">Relative path to the file in the folder structure</param> /// <param name="context">Optional context object or null</param> /// <param name="writer">The textwriter to write output into</param> /// <returns></returns> public bool RenderTemplate(string relativePath, object context, TextWriter writer) { // Set configuration data that is to be passed to the template (any object) Engine.TemplatePerRequestConfigurationData = new RazorFolderHostTemplateConfiguration() { TemplatePath = Path.Combine(this.TemplatePath, relativePath), TemplateRelativePath = relativePath, }; CompiledAssemblyItem item = GetAssemblyFromFileAndCache(relativePath); if (item == null) { writer.Close(); return false; } try { // String result will be empty as output will be rendered into the // Response object's stream output. However a null result denotes // an error string result = Engine.RenderTemplateFromAssembly(item.AssemblyId, context, writer); if (result == null) { this.SetError(Engine.ErrorMessage); return false; } } catch (Exception ex) { this.SetError(ex.Message); return false; } finally { writer.Close(); } return true; } /// <summary> /// Render a template from a source file on disk to a specified outputfile. /// </summary> /// <param name="relativePath">Relative path off the template root folder. Format: path/filename.cshtml</param> /// <param name="context">Any object that will be available in the template as a dynamic of this.Context</param> /// <param name="outputFile">Optional - output file where output is written to. If not specified the /// RenderingOutputFile property is used instead /// </param> /// <returns>true if rendering succeeds, false on failure - check ErrorMessage</returns> public bool RenderTemplate(string relativePath, object context, string outputFile) { if (outputFile == null) outputFile = RenderingOutputFile; try { using (StreamWriter writer = new StreamWriter(outputFile, false, Engine.Configuration.OutputEncoding, Engine.Configuration.StreamBufferSize)) { return RenderTemplate(relativePath, context, writer); } } catch (Exception ex) { this.SetError(ex.Message); return false; } return true; } /// <summary> /// Renders a template to string. Useful for RenderTemplate /// </summary> /// <param name="relativePath"></param> /// <param name="context"></param> /// <returns></returns> public string RenderTemplateToString(string relativePath, object context) { string result = string.Empty; try { using (StringWriter writer = new StringWriter()) { // String result will be empty as output will be rendered into the // Response object's stream output. However a null result denotes // an error if (!RenderTemplate(relativePath, context, writer)) { this.SetError(Engine.ErrorMessage); return null; } result = writer.ToString(); } } catch (Exception ex) { this.SetError(ex.Message); return null; } return result; } The idea is that you can create custom host container implementations that do exactly what you want fairly easily. Take a look at both the RazorFolderHostContainer and RazorStringHostContainer classes for the basic concepts you can use to create custom implementations. Notice also that you can set the engine’s PerRequestConfigurationData() from the host container: // Set configuration data that is to be passed to the template (any object) Engine.TemplatePerRequestConfigurationData = new RazorFolderHostTemplateConfiguration() { TemplatePath = Path.Combine(this.TemplatePath, relativePath), TemplateRelativePath = relativePath, }; which when set to a non-null value is passed to the Template’s InitializeTemplate() method. This method receives an object parameter which you can cast as needed: public override void InitializeTemplate(object configurationData) { // Pick up configuration data and stuff into Request object RazorFolderHostTemplateConfiguration config = configurationData as RazorFolderHostTemplateConfiguration; this.Request.TemplatePath = config.TemplatePath; this.Request.TemplateRelativePath = config.TemplateRelativePath; } With this data you can then configure any custom properties or objects on your main template class. It’s an easy way to pass data from the HostContainer all the way down into the template. The type you use is of type object so you have to cast it yourself, and it must be serializable since it will likely run in a separate AppDomain. This might seem like an ugly way to pass data around – normally I’d use an event delegate to call back from the engine to the host, but since this is running over AppDomain boundaries events get really tricky and passing a template instance back up into the host over AppDomain boundaries doesn’t work due to serialization issues. So it’s easier to pass the data from the host down into the template using this rather clumsy approach of set and forward. It’s ugly, but it’s something that can be hidden in the host container implementation as I’ve done here. It’s also not something you have to do in every implementation so this is kind of an edge case, but I know I’ll need to pass a bunch of data in some of my applications and this will be the easiest way to do so. Summing Up Hosting the Razor runtime is something I got jazzed up about quite a bit because I have an immediate need for this type of templating/merging/scripting capability in an application I’m working on. I’ve also been using templating in many apps and it’s always been a pain to deal with. The Razor engine makes this whole experience a lot cleaner and more light weight and with these wrappers I can now plug .NET based templating into my code literally with a few lines of code. That’s something to cheer about… I hope some of you will find this useful as well… Resources The examples and code require that you download the Razor runtimes. Projects are for Visual Studio 2010 running on .NET 4.0 Platform Installer 3.0 (install WebMatrix or MVC 3 for Razor Runtimes) Latest Code in Subversion Repository Download Snapshot of the Code Documentation (CHM Help File) © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in ASP.NET  .NET  

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 90 91 92 93 94